Bookmarker tag: archive/dissertation (277 notes)

[...] three processes running in parallel and mutually interlocked (a ‘triple helix’, if you like): the sequence of economic crises of inflation, public debt and private debt (today followed by dramatically expanding balance sheets of central banks, and a corresponding expansion of the money supply); the political-fiscal development from tax state to debt state to consolidation state; and a progressive shifting of the arenas of class conflict ‘upwards’, from labour market to welfare state to capital markets (and from here to the arcane sphere of central banks, financial-diplomatic summit conferences and international organizations).

[...] Until now, of course, longer-term growth rates have been falling together with peak tax rates, and so has the average tax take of rich democracies. Worse still, in parallel with the declining taxability of firms, their claims for national and regional infrastructure have become more demanding; firms ask for tax reductions and tax concessions, but also and at the same time for better roads, airports, schools, universities, research funding, etc. The result is a tendency for taxation of small and medium incomes to rise, for example by way of higher consumption taxes and social security contributions, resulting in an ever more regressive tax system.

In my view, for a historical system to be considered a capitalist system,
the dominant or deciding characteristic must be the persistent search for
the endless accumulation of capital—the accumulation of capital in order to
accumulate more capital. And for this characteristic to prevail, there must
be mechanisms that penalize any actors who seek to operate on the basis
of other values or other objectives, such that these nonconforming actors
are sooner or later eliminated from the scene, or at least severely hampered
in their ability to accumulate significant amounts of capital. All the many institutions of the modern world-system operate to promote, or at least are
constrained by the pressure to promote, the endless accumulation of capital.

Although educational credential inflation expands on false premises—the ideology that more education will produce more equality of opportunity, more high-tech economic performance, and more good jobs—it does provide some degree of solution to technological displacement of the middle class. Educational credential inflation helps absorb surplus labor by keeping more people out of the labor force; and if students receive a financial subsidy, either directly or in the form of low-cost (and ultimately unrepaid) loans, it acts as hidden transfer payments. In places where the welfare state is ideologically unpopular, the mythology of education supports a hidden welfare state. Add the millions of teachers in elementary, secondary, and higher education, and their administrative staffs, and the hidden Keynesianism of educational inflation may be said to virtually keep the capitalist economy afloat.

As long as the educational system can be somehow financed, it operates as hidden Keynesianism: a hidden form of transfer payments and pump-priming, the equivalent of New Deal make-work setting the unemployed to painting murals in post offices or planting trees in conservation camps, Educational expansion is virtually the only legitimately accepted form of Keynesian economic policy, because it is not overtly recognized as such. It expands under the banner of high technology and meritocracy—it is the technology that requires a more educated labor force. In a roundabout sense this is true: it is the technological displacement of labor that makes school a place of refuge from the shrinking job pool, although no one wants to recognize the fact. No matter—as long as the number of those displaced is shunted into an equal number of those expanding the population of students, the system will survive.

Another estimate of the timing of future capitalist crisis is provided by world-system (W-S) theory. In earlier writing on the capitalist world-system, Wallerstein and colleagues presented a theoretical model of systemic long cycles. The core regions of the W-S in their expansive phase generate their advantage by resources extracted under favorable conditions from the periphery. Hegemony is periodically threatened by conflicts within the core, and especially by semiperipheral zones rising to threaten the hegemon. Eventually the core gets caught up with, just as increasing competition in a new area of entrepreneurial profit brings down the profits once gained by the early innovator; in this respect, the W-S operates like Schumpeter's cycle of entrepreneurship, but on a global scale. With each new cycle, new opportunities for expansion and profit arise, under the leadership of a new hegemon. The crucial condition in the background, however, is that there must be an external area, outside the W-S, which can be incorporated and turned into the periphery of the system. Thus there is a final ending point to the W-S: when all the external areas have been penetrated. At this point the struggle for profit in the core and semiperiphery cannot be resolved by finding new economic regions to conquer. The W-S undergoes not just cyclical crisis but terminal transformation.

Ad blocking is tantamount to theft, or at the very least running a toll booth without paying.

• globalisation
• technological change (information and communications technology)
• growth of financial services
• changing pay norms
• reduced role of trade unions
• scaling back of the redistributive tax-and-transfer policy

[...] we risk creating the impression that inequality is rising on account of forces outside our control. It is far from obvious that these factors are beyond our influence or that they are exogenous to the economic and social system. Globalisation is the result of decisions taken by international organisations, by national governments, by corporations, and by individuals as workers and consumers. The direction of technological change is the product of decisions by firms, researchers, and governments. The financial sector may have grown to meet the demands of an aeing population in need of financial instruments that provide for retirement, but the form it has taken and the regulation of the industry have been subject to political and economic choices.

[...] the decline in unionisation is the result of the bias in technical change towards skilled workers. Technological change biased towards skilled workers undermines the coalition between them and unskilled workers that provides the basis for union bargaining power, and the consequent decline in unionisation amplifies the rise in wage dispersion.

[...] digital technology is becoming systematically important, much in the same way as finance. As the digital economy is an increasingly pervasive infrastructure for the contemporary economy, its collapse would be economically devastating. Lastly, because of its dynamism, the digital economy is presented as an ideal that can legitimate contemporary capitalism more broadly. The digital economy is becoming a hegemonic model: cities are to become smart, businesses must be disruptive, workers are to become flexible, and governments must be lean and intelligent. [...]

[...] capitalism has turned to data as one way to maintain economic growth and vitality in the face of a sluggish production sector. [...]

In 1998, as the East Asian crisis gathered pace, the US boom began to stumble as well. The bust was staved off through a series of rapid interest rate reductions made by the US Federal Reserve; and these reductions marked the beginning of a lengthy period of ultra-easy monetary policy. Implicitly the goal was to let equity markets continue to rise despite their 'irrational exuberance', in an effort to increase the nominal wealth of companies and households and hence their propensity to invest and consume. In a world where the US government was trying to reduce its deficits, fiscal stimulus was out of the question. This 'asset-price Keynesianism' offered an alternative way to get the economy growing in the absence of deficit spending and competitive manufacturing. And it worked for a time [...]

[...] At one end, tax evasion and cash hoarding have left US companies--particularly tech companies--with a vast amount of money to invest. This glut of corporate savings has--both directly and indirectly--combined with a loose monetary policy to strengthen the pursuit of riskier investments for the sake of a decent return. And at the other end, tax evasion is, by definition, a drain on government revenues and therefore has exacerbated austerity. The vast amount of tax money that goes missing in tax havens must be made up elsewhere. The result in further limitations on fiscal stimulus and a greater need for unorthodox monetary policies. Tax evasion, austerity, and extraordinary monetary policies are all mutually reinforcing.

The conjuncture today is therefore a product of long-term trends and cyclical movements. We continue to live in a capitalist society where competition and profit seeking provide the general parameters of our world. But the 1970s created a major shift within these general conditions, away from secure employment and unwieldy industrial behemoths and towards flexible labour and lean business models. During the 1990s a technological revoution was laid out when finance drove a bubble in the new internet industry that led to massive investment in the built environment. This phenomenon also heralded a turn towards a new model of growth: America was definitely giving up on its manufacturing base and turning towards asset-price Keynesianism as the best viable option. This new model of growth led to the housing bubble of the early twenty-first century and has driven the response to the 2008 crisis. Plagued by global concerns over public debt, governments have turned to monetary policy in order to ease economic conditions. This, combined with increases in corporate savings and with the expansion of tax havens, has let loose a vast glut of cash, which has been seeking out decent rates of investments in a low-interest rate world. Finally, workers have suffered immensely in the wake of the crisis and have been highly vulnerable to exploitative working conditions as a result of their need to earn an income. All this sets the scene for today's economy.

[...] the important element is that the capitalist class owns the platform, not necessarily that it produces a physical product [...]

[...] if our online interactions are free labour, then these companies must be a significant boon to capitalism overall--a whole new landscape of exploited labour has been opened up. On the other hand, if this is not free labour, then these firms are parasitical on other value-producing industries and global capitalism is in a more dire state. A quick glance at the stagnating global economy suggests that the latter is more likely.

Rather than exploiting free labour, the position taken here is that advertising platforms appropriate data as a raw material. [...]

[...] It would seem that these are asset-less companies; we might call them virtual platforms. Yet the key is that they do own the most important asset: the platform of software and data analytics. Lean platforms operate through a hyper-outsourced model, whereby workers are outsourced, fixed capital is outsourced, maintenance costs are outsourced, and training is outsourced. All that remains is a bare extractive minimum--control over the platform that enables a monopoly rent to be gained.

[...] the traditional labour market that most closely approximates the lean platform model is an old and low-tech one: the market of day labourers--agricultural workers, dock workers, or other low-wage workers--who would show up at a site in the morning in the hope of finding a job for the day. [...] The gig economy simply moves these sites online and adds a layer of pervasive surveillance. A tool of survival is being marketed by Silicon Valley as a tool of liberation.

[...] Where is the money coming from? Broadly speaking, it is surplus capital seeking higher rates of return in a low interest rate environment. The low interest rates have depressed the returns on traditional financial investments, forcing investors to seek out new avenues for yield. Rather than a finance boom or a housing boom, surplus capital today appears to be building a technology boom. [...] Just like the earlier dot-com boom, growth in the lean platform sector is premised on expectations of future profits rather than on actual profits. The hope is that the low margin business of taxis will eventually pay off once Uber has gained a monopoly position. Until these firms reach monopoly status (and possibly even then), their profitability appears to be generated solely by the removal of costs and the lowering of wages and not by anything substantial.

[...] The challenge today, however, is that capitalist investment is not suficient to overturn monopolies; access to data, network effects, and path dependency place even higher hurdles in the way of overcoming a monopoly like Google. This does not mean the end of competition or of the struggle for market power, but it means a change in the form of competition. In particular, this is a shift away from competition over prices (e.g. many services are offered for free). Here we come to an essential point. Unlike in manufacturing, in platforms competitiveness is not judged solely by the criterion of a maximal difference between costs and prices; data collection and analysis also contribute to how competitiveness is judged and ranked. This means that, if these platforms wish to remain competitive, they must intensify their extraction, analysis, and control of data--and they must invest in the fixed capital to do so. And while their genetic drive is towards monopolisation, at present they are faced with an increasingly competitive environment comprised of other great platforms.

[...] 'once we understand this [tendency], it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand'. Calls for privacy miss how the suppression of privacy is at the heart of this business model. [...]

[...] lean platforms are entirely reliant on a vast mania of surplus capital. The investment in tech start-ups today is less an alternative to the centrality of finance and more an expression of it. Just like the original tech boom, it was initiated and sustained by a loose monetary policy and by large amounts of capital seeking higher returns. While it is impossible to call then a bubble may burst, there are signs that the enthusiasm for this sector is already over. Tech stocks have taken a massive hit in 2016. There has been a wave of cutbacks on employee perks in the start-up sector--no more open bars and free snacks. [...] What is likely to happen is for a large number of these services to go out of business in the next couple of years, while others will move towards becoming luxury services, producing on-demand convenience at high prices. Whereas the tech boom of the 1990s at least left us with the basis for the internet, the tech boom of the 2010s looks as though it will simply leave us with premium services for the rich.

Rather than just regulating corporate platforms, efforts could be made to create public platforms--platforms owned and controlled by the people. (And, importantly, independent of the surveillance state apparatus.) This would mean investing the state's vast resources into the technology necessary to support these platforms and offering them as public utilities. More radically, we can push for postcapitalist platforms that make use of the data collected by these platforms in order to distribute resources, enable democratic participation, and generate further technological development. Perhaps today we must collectivise the platforms.

Perhaps the CEOs of Shell Oil or Citibank are indeed cruel profiteers and super-rich megalomaniacs. Perhaps they really are bad guys. That is not, and cannot be, the basis of a critique of capitalism. Capitalism is neither made nor defended by profiteers and super-rich megalomaniacs alone, nor did they produce the system that requires the structural position they fill. In reality, capitalism is produced and reproduced by elaborate, historically embedded, and powerful social and material relationships in which most us participate. In fact, many of us struggle to maintain those relationships, sometimes with all our might, because we feel like we have little choice. [...]

The problem is not that capitalism is a conspiracy of greedy people. The problem is that capitalism, as a way of organizing our collective life, does its best to force us to be greedy—and if that is true, then finger-pointing at nasty CEOs and investment bankers may be morally satisfying, but fails to address the problem. We are aiming for more than a world with nicer hedge-fund managers.

Two premises follow from this. First, we need to understand capitalism in more than just a wishy-washy, general way. If we want to change it, whether by tweaking or reworking the whole economic fabric of society, we need fairly detailed knowledge of the how, why, what, who, and where. Second, while critical theories (like Marxism) have a lot to offer, it is just as important to seriously engage capitalist theories of the capitalist economy, the ideas that make up modern orthodox ("neoclassical") economics and political economy. In other words, we have to recognize that as capitalism has developed, it has done so in tandem with ideas of human society with which it makes sense of itself.

Without some understanding of modern economic thinking, we cannot understand capitalism, because we cannot understand the logic and analysis that justifies it, that orders its institutions and gives it the legitimacy that has helped it survive and thrive for so long. Capitalism is organized the way it is because of how capital understands the world—an understanding, we must admit, shared by millions of people all over the world. Capitalism is not maintained by mere violence and deception. If it were, it would be far less robust. It is also sustained by a set of institutions, techniques, and ideas about human affairs and social goals that, for many people in the wealthy world, are unquestionable, as natural as gravity. Critics of capitalism ignore or dismiss these ideas at their peril.

This underlines the fact that how we explain the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s is not merely "academic". On the contrary, it is enormously important today, both politically and economically, because we are constantly struggling over what lessons the past teaches. Different interpretations of the past lead to different conclusions regarding what can be done at present. But we must not reject orthodox explanations just because they are orthodox. In fact, capitalist reason provides some very helpful tools for understanding capitalism. There are aspects of contemporary economic life that appear to be very well diagnosed by conventional tools. Rather than rejecting orthodoxy because of its ideological predisposition to posit capital as the engine of historical progress, even in periods before capitalism itself existed, and to see workers and noncapitalists as "backward" forces, hindering progress, we need to see it for what it is: a set of ways of understanding the world that is a product of the very world it is trying to explain. Capitalist reason is embedded in and emerges from a particular, ideologically saturated world. Recognising the embeddedness of "reason" in its time is about as close to truth as we are ever going to get with respect to actually existing human communities. We have to resist the desire to dismiss it out of hand, and search instead for the truth in it, truth of which that reason might not itself be aware.

[...] Neoliberalism is not just about getting rid of rules, or "deregulation." Removing tariffs, capital controls, currency pegs, restrictions on foreign ownership, and so forth are all essential elements of neoliberal regulatory programs, abolishing rules that limit firms' opportunity to maximize short-term returns. But states and firms and international institutions need not only to eliminate rules, they must also create new ones, imposing, extending, or deepening regulatory or legal structures where they were previously underdeveloped or nonexistent. For example, countries the world over have established intellectual property rights regimes for everything from medicinal plants to corporate logos, often where no such legal frameworks existed before. That is not deregulation by any stretch of the imagination. Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell were among the first to point out these complexities in "actually existing neoliberalism," which they label "roll-back" (deregulation) and "roll-out" (reregulation). Neoliberalism has always involved both.

[...] The biggest problem for finance capital, and almost anybody else who wanted to borrow to invest, was not where to get the money but where to put it all [...]. Idle money is not capital; it is not accumulating [...]. [...]

On the contrary, the explanation is far more straightforward: capital won. Sometimes with armies, sometimes with persuasion, sometimes with money, and sometimes by accident, but it won. For at least the last thirty or forty years, and this is increasingly true in nominally "noncapitalist" nation-states like China also, capital has proven richer, more powerful, more expansive, more convincing, and more real than any other political economic force on the planet. It is not a myth, it is not an elaborate hoax, and its wealth and dominance are not fictitious or illusory. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it has written the political economic rule book by which the world plays, and defined the terms and means by which one might "legitimately" break those rules. Socialists may have lost their ideological fire, or they may have read the writing on the wall and decided that given the options available to them, and the ultimate political and economic objectives to which socialism aims, i.e., the long-term betterment of citizens' everyday lives, their constituencies had to play by the rules, and the rules rule against being socialists.

[...] most of these movements, through no fault or lack of imagination of their own, are embedded in an overwhelmingly capitalist matrix. They are islands in an ocean. More islands are always a welcome sight, but the ocean remains.

I'm a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and I think that you are just the company to give it to me.

Yes, this would violate copyright law as it stands, but Microsoft has been making tools of piracy that change copyright law for decades now. Outlook, Exchange and MSN are tools that abet widescale digital infringement.

More significantly, IIS and your caching proxies all make and serve copies of documents without their authors' consent, something that, if it is legal today, is only legal because companies like Microsoft went ahead and did it and dared lawmakers to prosecute.

Microsoft stood up for its customers and for progress, and
won so decisively that most people never even realized that
there was a fight.

This technology, usually called "Digital Rights Management"
(DRM) proposes to make your computer worse at copying some
of the files on its hard-drive or on other media. Since all computer
operations involve copying, this is a daunting task—as
security expert Bruce Schneier has said, "Making bits harder
to copy is like making water that's less wet."

The futurists were just plain wrong. An "information economy"
can't be based on selling information. Information technology
makes copying information easier and easier. The more
IT you have, the less control you have over the bits you send
out into the world. It will never, ever, EVER get any harder to
copy information from here on in. The information economy is
about selling everything except information.

Latterly, the idea has been taken up by Silicon Valley luminaries and venture capitalists, some putting up money for the cause, as we shall see. They include Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar, Sam Altman, head of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, Albert Wenger, prominent venture capitalist, Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, Elon Musk, founder of SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent.

[...] His personal technical contribution built on a stream of inventions and ideas of others, yet he has gained most of the income attributable to those inventions and ideas as well as his own. And that income in turn is based on the lengthy monopoly he enjoys on Microsoft software and other products, thanks to patent and copyright laws that were vastly strengthened globally by the World Trade Organization in 1995. He was thus helped to gain his fortune by state and international regulations, rather than by his individual endeavour alone. His income is based largely not on 'merit' or 'hard work' but on artificial rules privileging a particular way of gaining income.

More often than not, individual wealth owes more to luck, laws and regulations, inheritance or fortunate timing than to individual brilliance. Leaving aside fortunes criminally obtained, many people have become rich through the commercial plunder of the commons that belong to all, and through rental income derived from the commercialization and privatization of public services and amenities. This is further justification for taxing rental income to give everybody a social dividend, a share of socially created wealth.

So how could inequality rise so sharply since the 1990s, despite the stability of the wage-profit split? First, because the wage structure has shifted markedly in favor of very high wages. While the vast majority have seen most of their wage increases absorbed by inflation, very high salaries—especially those above €200,000 a year—have experienced considerable increases in purchasing power.

The second explanation is that the much-discussed stability of the wage-profit split doesn’t take into account increased levies on labor (especially payroll taxes for social insurance) or the fall in taxes on capital (particularly the profit tax). If we look at the incomes actually pocketed by households, we find that the capital income share (dividends, interest, rent) has risen continually while the after-tax wage share has dropped relentlessly, making the growth of inequality that much worse. Not to mention that companies doped up by the stock market bubble and its illusory (and undertaxed) capital gains have doubled their dividend payouts in the last twenty years, to the point where their ability to self-finance their operations has gone negative (retained profits, which are less than half of gross profits, are not even enough to replace worn-out capital). The answer, again, lies in the tax system and requires a rebalancing between labor and capital—for example, by subjecting business profits to family-benefit and national health contributions. [...]

[...] Was not capital’s claim to a part of the revenues originally justified by its willingness to assume economic risk, with employees abandoning a part of the added value of their labour in exchange for a fixed remuneration, shielded from the vagaries of the market? Yet the new structural conditions endow the capitalist desire with enough strategic latitude that it is able to decline to bear even the weight of cyclicality, pushing the task of adjusting to it onto the class of employees, precisely those who were constitutively exempt from it. [...]

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.

[...] 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.

[...] 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.

Well, I originally regarded myself as in the pragmatic centre of the spectrum, more or less social democratic in outlook. My reorientation came with an expansion of the kind of questions I was prepared to accept as legitimate. So whereas five years ago or so, I would be content to search for better, more effective ways to regulate the likes of Google and Facebook, today it’s not something I spend much time on. Instead, I am questioning who should run and own both the infrastructure and the data running through it, since I no longer believe that we can accept that all these services ought to be delivered by the market and regulated only after the fact. [...] no plausible story can emerge unless Silicon Valley itself is situated within some broader historical narrative—of changes in production and consumption, changes in state forms, changes in the surveillance capabilities and needs of the US military. There’s much to be learnt from Marxist historiography here, especially when most of the existing histories of ‘the Internet’ seem to be stuck in some kind of ideational irrelevance, with little to no attention to questions of capital and empire.

Technology companies can enact all sorts of political agendas, and right now the dominant agendas enforce neoliberalism and austerity, using centralized data to identify immigrants to be deported, or poor people likely to default on their debts. Yet I believe there is a huge positive potential in the accumulation of more data, in a good institutional—and by that I mean political—setup. [...] it becomes clear you don’t want two hundred different providers of information services—you want just one, because the scale-effects make things much easier for users. The big question, of course, is whether that player has to be a private capitalist corporation, or some federated, publicly-run set of services that could reach a data-sharing agreement free of monitoring by intelligence agencies.

[...] If you’re trying to figure out how a non-neoliberal regime can function in the twenty-first century and still be constructive towards both environment and technology [...] You will need some kind of basic planning and thinking about an overall informational infrastructure for our communal living, rather than just a clutch of services any company can provide. Social democrats will tell you: it’s okay, we’ll just regulate private firms to do it. But I don’t think that’s plausible. It’s very hard to imagine what regulating Google would mean at this point. For them, regulating Google means making it pay more tax. Fine, let it pay more tax. But this would do nothing to address the more fundamental issues. For the moment we don’t have the power and resources to tackle these. There is no political will to develop the necessary alternative vision in Europe. [...]

At a national level, we need governments that do not deliver the neoliberal gospel. At this point, it would take a very brave one to say, we just don’t think private companies should run these things. We also need governments that would take a bet and say: we believe in the privacy of individuals, so we are not going to subject everything they do to monitoring, and we’ll have a strong legal system to back up all requests for data. But this is where it gets tricky, because you could end up with so much legalism corroding the infrastructure that it becomes counterproductive. The question is how can we build a system that will actually favour citizens, and perhaps even favour some kind of competition in its search engines. It’s primarily from data and not their algorithms that powerful companies currently derive their advantages, and the only way to curb that power is to take the data completely out of the market realm, so that no company can own them. Data would accrue to citizens, and could be shared at various social levels. Companies wanting to use them would have to pay some kind of licensing fee, and only be able to access attributes of the information, not the entirety of it.

Unless we figure out a legal-social regime that will allow this stock of data to grow without it ending up in the corporate silos of Google or Facebook, we won’t get very far. But once we have it, there could be all sorts of social experimentation. With enough data you could start planning beyond the horizon of the individual consumer—at the level of communities, neighbourhoods, cities. That’s the only way to prevent centralization. Unless we change the legal status of data, we’re not going to get very far.

I’m not saying that the system should be run by the state. But you would have at least to pass some sort of legislation to change the status of data, and you would need the state to enforce it. Certainly, the less the state is involved otherwise, the better. I’m not saying that there should be a Stasi-like operation soaking up everyone’s data. The radical left notion of the commons probably has something to contribute here. There are ways you can spell out a structure for this data storage, data ownership, data sharing, that will not just default to a centrally planned and run repository. When it’s owned by citizens, it doesn’t necessarily have to be run by the state.

So I don’t think that those are the two only options. Another idea has been to break up the monopoly of Google and Facebook by giving citizens ownership of their data, but without changing their fundamental legal status. So you treat information about individuals as a commodity that they can sell. That’s Jaron Lanier’s model. But if you turn data into a money-printing machine for citizens, whereby we all become entrepreneurs, that will extend the financialization of everyday life to the most extreme level, driving people to obsess about monetizing their thoughts, emotions, facts, ideas—because they know that, if these can only be articulated, perhaps they will find a buyer on the open market. This would produce a human landscape worse even than the current neoliberal subjectivity. I think there are only three options. We can keep these things as they are, with Google and Facebook centralizing everything and collecting all the data, on the grounds that they have the best algorithms and generate the best predictions, and so on. We can change the status of data to let citizens own and sell them. Or citizens can own their own data but not sell them, to enable a more communal planning of their lives. That’s the option I prefer.

The People’s Platform looks at the implications of the digital age for cultural democracy in various sectors—music, film, news, advertising—and how battles over copyright, piracy and privacy laws have evolved. Taylor rightly situates the tech euphoria of the late 90s in the context of Greenspan’s asset-price bubble, pointing out that deregulated venture-capital funds swelled from $12bn in 1996 to $106bn in 2000. Where tech-utopians hailed the political economy of the internet as ‘a better form of socialism’ (Wired’s Kevin Kelly) or ‘a vast experiment in anarchy’ (Google’s Eric Schmidt and the State Department’s Jared Cohen), she shows how corporations dominate the new landscape [...]

[...] the main source of Facebook’s and Google’s profits is other firms’ advertising expenditure, an annual $700bn in the US; but this in turn depends on the surplus extracted from workers who produce ‘actual things’. The logic of advertising drives the tech giants’ voracious appetite for our data. [...]

While Taylor’s dismissal of free software as ‘freedom to tinker’ captures something real about its prima facie narrowness as a political programme, she misses the peculiar way in which this very narrowness gives rise to significant implications when we broaden the frame and examine a more social picture. While the individual user may not be interested in tinkering with, for example, the Linux kernel, as opposed to simply using it, the fact that it can be tinkered with opens up a space of social agency that is not at all trivial. Since everyone can access all the code all the time, it is impossible for any entity, capital or state, to establish any definitive control over users on the basis of the code itself. And since the outcomes of this process are pooled, one does not have to be personally interested in ‘tinkering’ to benefit directly from this freedom. With non-free software one must simply trust whoever, or whichever organization, created it. With free software, this ‘whoever’ is socially open-ended, with responsibility ultimately lying with the community of users itself.

[...] In Brenner’s account, however, the tech boom should be seen as only one component of the equity bubble of the late 1990s. That glorious surge was driven not by the advent of a new technological wave but rather by the codependent irrationality of markets intoxicated by the prospect of endless short-run returns and a Federal Reserve confident that it could make everybody feel wealthier (due to rising stock and real estate prices) without ensuring that some kind of underlying wealth was actually being produced. [...]

[...] One particularly important approach was a political-economic strategy to link the crisis of capitalism to union power. The subsequent defeat of organised labour throughout the core capitalist nations has perhaps been neoliberalism’s most important achievement, significantly changing the balance of power between labour and capital. The means by which this was achieved were diverse, from physical confrontation and combat, to using legislation to undermine solidarity and industrial action, to embracing shifts in production and distribution that compromised union power (such as disaggregating supply chains), to re-engineering public opinion and consent around a broadly neoliberal agenda of individual freedom and ‘negative solidarity’. The latter denotes more than mere indifference to worker agitations – it is the fostering of an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, a declining pension pot), then everyone else must as well. The result of these combined shifts was a hollowing-out of unions and the defeat of the working class in the developed world.

[...] once a postcapitalist infrastructure is in place, it would be just as difficult to shift away from it, regardless of any reactionary forces. Technology and technological infrastructures therefore pose both significant hurdles for overcoming the capitalist mode of production, as well as significant potentials for securing the longevity of an alternative. This is why, for example, it is insufficient even to have a massive populist movement against the current forms of capitalism. Without a new approach to things like production and distribution technologies, every social movement will find itself forced back into capitalistic practices.

[...] The direction of technological development is determined not only by technical and economic considerations, but also by political intentions. More than just seizing the means of production, this approach declares the need to invent new means of production. A final approach focuses on how existing technology contains occluded potentials that strain at our current horizon and how they might be repurposed. Under capitalism, technology’s potential is drastically constrained – reduced to a mere vehicle for generating profit and controlling workers. Yet potentials continue to exist in excess of these current uses. The task before us is to uncover the hidden potentials and link them up to scalable processes of change. [...]

Despite the protestations of obsessive fans and dismissive naysayers, for the site’s most successful content creators, simply switching on a camera and spouting whatever comes to mind is no longer the entire job description. A YouTuber is a small-screen entrepreneur who must oversee growth in a highly competitive and ever-expanding market, win merchandise deals, broker brand tie-ins and often manage support staff.

[...] As capital and capitalist markets began to outgrow national borders, with the help of international trade agreements and assisted by new transportation and communication technologies, the power of labour, inevitably locally based, weakened, and capital was able to press for a shift to a new growth model, one that works by redistributing from the bottom to the top. This was when the march into neoliberalism began, as a rebellion of capital against Keynesianism, with the aim of enthroning the Hayekian model in its place. Thus the threat of unemployment returned, together with its reality, gradually replacing political legitimacy with economic discipline. Lower growth rates were acceptable for the new powers as long as they were compensated by higher profit rates and an increasingly inegalitarian distribution. Democracy ceased to be functional for economic growth and in fact became a threat to the performance of the new growth model; it therefore had to be decoupled from the political economy. This was when ‘post-democracy’ was born.

[...] consumption in mature capitalist societies has long become dissociated from material need. The lion’s share of consumption expenditure today – and a rapidly growing one – is spent not on the use value of goods, but on their symbolic value, their aura or halo. This is why industry practitioners find themselves paying more than ever for marketing, including not just advertising but also product design and innovation. Nevertheless, in spite of the growing sophistication of sales promotion, the intangibles of culture make commercial success difficult to predict – certainly more so than in an era when growth could be achieved by gradually supplying all households in a country with a washing machine.

[...] Habermas’s partial incorporation of systems theory – the recognition of a technocratic claim to dominance over certain sectors of society, analogous to relativity theory conceding a limited applicability to classical mechanics – depoliticizes the economic, narrowing it down to a unidimensional emphasis on efficiency, as the price for smuggling a space for politicization into a post-materialist theory of ‘modernity’. The fundamental insight of political economy is forgotten: that the natural laws of the economy, which appear to exist by virtue of their own efficiency, are in reality nothing but projections of social-power relations which present themselves ideologically as technical necessities. The consequence is that it ceases to be understood as a capitalist economy and becomes ‘the economy’, pure and simple, while the social struggle against capitalism is replaced by a political and juridical struggle for democracy [...]

[...] dreams, promises and imagined satisfaction are not at all marginal but, on the contrary, central. While standard economics and, in its trail, standard political economy, recognize the importance of confidence and consumer spending for economic growth, they do not do justice to the dynamically evolving nature of the desires that make consumers consume. A permanent underlying concern in advanced capitalist societies is that markets may at some point become saturated, resulting in stagnant or declining spending and, worse still, in diminished effectiveness of monetized work incentives. It is only if consumers, almost all of whom live far above the level of material subsistence, can be convinced to discover new needs, and thereby render themselves ‘psychologically’ poor, that the economy of rich capitalist societies can continue to grow. [...]

[...] More money than ever is today being spent by firms on advertisement and on building and sustaining the popular images and auras on which the success of a product seems to depend in saturated markets. In particular, the new channels of communication made available by the interactive internet seem to be absorbing a growing share of what firms spend on the socialization and cultivation of their customers. A rising share of the goods that make today’s capitalist economies grow would not sell if people dreamed other dreams than they do – which makes understanding, developing and controlling their dreams a fundamental concern of political economy in advanced-capitalist society

Centrally planned economies now dominate the world economy, but instead of having 'Socialist Republic' after their names, they have 'Inc' and 'plc': they are massively centralized, commercial hierarchies, and this has happened without much discussion of their feasibility or otherwise.

In 2013, the New Yorker's George Packer found that companies like Google and Facebook are full of people who fervently believe they are changing the world more effectively than any government can, and that it is entirely appropriate to become extremely rich by doing so. Packer found the phrase 'change the world' used constantly in these companies and among their backers, yet they were surrounded by (and oblivious to) levels of homelessness and poverty that had been unknown in San Francisco a couple of decades earlier.

[...] when technology becomes an independent business, it no longer responds primarily to needs, but it creates innovations that have to find and define new markets. It has to create new wants, needs and desires not only on the part of producers (through productive consumption) but also, as we see all around us on a daily basis, on the part of final consumers. This business thrives upon and actively promotes the fetish belief in technological fixes for all problems.

[...] this is the way I want us to consider Wal- Mart, however briefly: namely, as a thought experiment—not, after Lenin’s crude but practical fashion, as an institution faced with which (after the revolution) we can “lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus,” but rather as what Raymond Williams called the emergent, as opposed to the residual—the shape of a Utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the Utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.

Instagram isn't worth a billion dollars just because those thirteen employees are extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it. Networks need a great number of people to participate in them to generate significant value. But when they have them, only a small number of people get paid. That has the net effect of centralizing wealth and limiting overall economic growth.

An amazing number of people offer an amazing amount of value over networks. But the lion's share of wealth now flows to those who aggregate and route those offerings, rather than those who provide the "raw materials." A new kind of middle class, and a more genuine, growing information economy, could come about if we could break out of the "free information" idea and into a universal micropayment system. We might even be able to strengthen individual liberty and self-determination even when the machines get very good.

[...] Undoing the Siren Server pattern is the only way back to a truer form of capitalism.

Facebook's mission statement commits the company "to make the world more open and connected." Google's official mission is to "organize the world's information." No high-frequency trading server has issued a public mission statement that I know of, but when I speak to the proprietors, they claim they are optimizing what is spent where in "the world." The conceit of optimizing the world is self-serving and deceptive. The optimizations approximated in the real world as a result of Siren Servers are optimal only from the points of view of those servers.

Once the data measured off a person creates a debt to that person, a number of systemic benefits will accrue. For just one example, for the first time there will be accurate accounting of who has gathered what information about whom. No amount of privacy and disclosure law will accomplish what accounting will do when money is at stake.

Extending the commercial sphere genuinely into the information space will lead to a more moderate, balanced world. What we've been doing instead is treating information commerce as a glaring exception to the equity that underlies democracy.

So an ATTENTION ARMS RACE is set up: the more a market society becomes mediatized, the more it must dedicate a significant proportion of its activity to the production of demand, investing ever greater resources into the machinery of attention attraction. Like military arms races, this attention arms race is in itself a tragic waste, thanks to a sub-optimal organization of inter-human relations. [...]

[...] the phenomena of alignment, convergence, synchronization and concentration of attention brought about by PageRank would remain innocent enough if the attention economy wasn't completely overdetermined by the quest for financial profit that has now been elevated to a condition of survival.

[...] the PRINCIPLE OF COMMODIFICATION which seeks to submit attentional flows to needs and desires that will maximize financial returns. If, as an attention condenser, PageRank exemplifies the extraordinary power of the digitalization of our minds, as a capitalist enterprise, Google exemplifies the most harmful control that it is possible to imagine the vectoralist class exercising over our collective attention. [...]

The problem is that we don't have many levers of control over big tech companies. The traditional stuff doesn't work. Usually, if a company is doing something a lot of people think is unethical, you can boycott them. You can't really boycott Google or Facebook. You're not their customer to begin with. Their customers are advertisers and publishers. Also, they're monopolies. They're centralized and they benefit from network effects. Boycotting them means cutting yourself off from the online world. People just won't do it in numbers.

And shareholder revolts won’t work because these companies are structured so that the founders always have full voting rights. Zuckerberg is going to run Facebook no matter if he only has one share. That’s how it’s written. As for the media, the press isn’t going to say anything bad about Facebook or Google because those are the main outlets for journalism right now.

That really just leaves the employees. Tech employees have an outsize force because they’re very expensive to hire and it takes a long time to train people up. Even for very skilled workers, it takes months and months to become fully productive at a place like Google because you have to learn the internal tooling, you have to learn how things are done, you have to learn the culture. It’s a competitive job market and employee morale is vital. If people start fleeing your company, it’s hard to undo the damage.

So tech workers are a powerful lever. And knowing that fact, it seems unwise not to use the best tools at our disposal. The point isn’t to improve our economic well-being, but to pursue an ethical agenda.

There's long been an ambition that the internet should be about democracy. This goes back to the beginning—to geeks swapping code, to open protocols that let users post whatever. But notice that when people in tech talk about "democratizing" some tool or service, they almost always mean just allowing more people to access that thing. Gone are the usual connotations of democracy: shared ownership and governance. This is because the internet's openness has rarely extended to its underlying economy, which has tended to be an investor-controlled extraction game based on surveillance and abuse of vulnerable workers.

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.

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.

[...] He suggests that we are on the cusp of an open access revolution that will overcome capitalism, heralding a new mode of production based on the principles championed by the likes of Swartz (whom he does not mention). According to Mason, there is now a massive and irreconcilable contradiction between the forces of production (new technologies that promote sharing, peer production and counter-capitalist practices of open access) and the relations of production (based on private property, paywalls and the enforcement of laws that Swartz aimed to challenge). Mason places great emphasis on endogenous technological change (first posited by Paul Romer), claiming that because information is infinitely replicable, with a margin or reproduction cost of zero, the price mechanism is eroded since it can no longer be based on scarcity, supply and demand and so forth. Songs on an iPod don’t degrade with use and those same zero-marginal cost processes will soon infiltrate physical goods too as they acquire digital components. In this environment, firms must (a) simply invent a commodity’s price and (b) create a monopoly to shore up its value. As far as Mason is concerned, such structures are swimming against the tide, swiftly becoming obsolete as a new economic dawn arrives.

[...]

We should not believe for one minute that multinational firms are embarrassed by this outrageous income, as Mason implies, perhaps even backing down in shame. No, these institutions instead tend to react like an outraged monarch, displaying egregious aggression to preserve their right to extract wealth unhindered, since the profit margins are so lucrative yet based on such flimsy grounds. [...]

It was only inevitable that the so-called ‘sharing economy’ would develop out of these socio-economic conditions. Technology, desperation and the continuing individualisation of culture has seen this industry dramatically expand in the USA, UK and elsewhere. Governments now officially speak about its importance and contribution to a nation’s economic wellbeing. The sharing economy has a list of alternative titles that make it look as if we are entering into a new age of utopian collectivism where amateurish goodwill reigns supreme: the peer economy, networked economy, on-demand economy, collaborative economy, gig economy and so forth. But once again we see a typical feature of wreckage economics behind the trend. Business platforms such as Airbnb ride on the informal economy, opportunistically exploiting the insecurity that has become a norm under crisis capitalism. The once laudable commons-based system of peer production has been commercialised by big business using old school middle-man or rentier tactics, thereby generating profits without production. They say that it’s about saving ‘waste’ (idle cars could be taxies, empty bedrooms could be holiday accommodation, etc.). But it’s really a method of exploiting the societal devastation that has unfolded following the recession. [...]

[...]

[...] Uber, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit and similar firms function through a three-stage process: seek an impoverished sector of society, capture their time and resource (with minimal investment costs) and then present that resource to a customer for a surcharge. This is why some have suggested that the sharing economy is more about access.

The distinction between affirmation and transformation can be applied, first of all, to the perspective of distributive justice. In this perspective, the paradigmatic example of an affirmative strategy is the liberal welfare state, which aims to redress maldistribution through income transfers. Relying heavily on public assistance, this approach seeks to increase the consumption share of the disadvantaged, while leaving intact the underlying economic structure. In contrast, the classic example of a transformative strategy is socialism. Here the aim is to redress unjust distribution at the root--by transforming the framework that generates it. Far from simply altering the end-state distribution of consumption shares, this approach would change the division of labor, the forms of ownership, and other deep structures of the economic system.

[...] The biggest tech companies are, among other things, the most powerful gatekeepers the world has ever known. Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information; Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to sort the news we encounter; Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.

Over the decades, the Internet revolutionized reading patterns. Instead of beginning with the home pages for Slate or the New York Times, a growing swath of readers now encounters articles through Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple. Sixty-two percent of Americans get their news through social media, and most of it through Facebook; a third of all traffic to media sites flows from Google. This has placed media in a state of abject financial dependence on tech companies. To survive, media companies lost track of their values. Even journalists of the highest integrity have internalized a new mind-set; they worry about how to successfully pander to Google's and Facebook's algorithms. [...]

[...] Each pathbreaking innovation promises to liberate technology from the talons of the monopolists, to create a new network so democratic that it will transform human nature. Somehow, in each instance, humanity remains its familiar self. Instead of profound redistributions of power, the new networks are captured by new monopolies, each more powerful and sophisticated than the one before it. [...]

the new knowledge monopolies [...] don't actually produce knowledge; they just sift and organize it. We rely on a small handful of companies to provide us with a sense of hierarchy, to identify what we read and what we should ignore, to pick informational winners and losers. It's incredible economic and cultural power that they have amassed because of a sudden change in the strange economics of the commodity they traffic in, a change they hastened.

The first breach in the barricade is something called "branded content" or "native advertising". [...] It is an ad that is written to resemble journalism--a pseudo-piece about the new scientific consensus [...] the ads are usually produced by the media companies themselves, not an ad agency. [..] There's usually a tag indicating that the article has been "sponsored" or "paid for by advertisers." But it's as discreet as possible, and that's the point. Advertisers will pay a premium for branded content, because it stands such a good chance of confusing the reader into clicking.

The profusion of data has changed the character of journalism. It has turned it into a commodity, something to be marketed, tested, and calibrated. Perhaps media have always thought this way. But if that impulse always existed, it was at least buffered. [...]

[...] Capitalism has always dreamed of activating the desire to consume, the ability to tap the human brain to stimulate its desire for products that it never contemplated needing. Data helps achieve this old dream. It makes us more malleable, easier to addict, prone to nudging. It's the reason that Amazon recommendations for your next purchase so often result in sales, or why Google ads result in clicks.

[...] data is infinitely renewable. It continuously allows the new monopolists to conduct experiments to master the anticipation of trends, to better understand customers, to build superior algorithms. Before he went to Google, as the company's chief economist, Hal Varian cowrote an essential handbook called Information Rules. Varian predicted that data would exaggerate the workings of the market. "Positive feedback makes the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, leading to extreme outcomes." One of these extreme outcomes is the proliferation of data-driven monopolies.

Because circulation was never a profitable business, the Internet hardly required a large leap of imagination. Instead of selling journalism to readers at a loss, media would give it away for nothing. Media executives bet everything on a fantasy: Publishing free articles on the Internet would enable newspapers and magazines to increase their readership manifold; advertising riches would follow the audience growth. [...]

It might have worked, were it not for Google and Facebook. Newspapers and magazines assumed that the Web would be like a giant newsstand--and readers would remain attached to the sterling reputations of their titles, their distinctive sensibility, and brand-name writers. The new megaportals changed all that. They became the entry point for the Internet--and when readers entered, they hardly paid attention to the names attached to the journalism they read.

With their enormous scale, Facebook and Google could undercut media, selling ad space for phenomenally little because they had nearly infinite windows of display. Since they specialized in collecting data on their users, they could guarantee advertisers a precisely micro-targeted audience. [...]

Advertising has become an unwinnable battle. Facebook and Google will always beat media. Between 2006 and 2017, advertiser spending on newspapers dropped by nearly 75 percent, with most of that money redirected to Facebook and Google. Money shifted because the tech monopolists simply do a much better job of steadily holding the attention of audiences.

[...] Technology and power are implicated in one another historically and in contemporary social arrangements. There is no experience of technology that is not at the same time an experience of a kind of social power, but it does not always involve domination. [...]

[...] part of technology design is precisely the art of making clear to the user what they can and cannot do with it. Technology design always involves both a closing off of the technology's innards into a "black box" and the projection of messages on its outer surface that will guide the user into successful operation of the artefact. There is a concealed politics here, akin to statecraft. How technological artefacts are presented to users involves a politics of design that reflects features of the social content. It is here that we find the politics of the relationship between technology and social power. [...]

[...] technology can embody valid knowledge and constitute a set of reliable, seemingly neutral tools or points of leverage over nature and at the same time constitute an instance of prevailing, hegemonic social rationality and so be implicated in social power. [...]

The idea of hegemonic technological rationality is intended to encompass what the Frankfurt School called instrumental reason and what Weber analyzed as societal rationalization as these apply to technology design as a social practice. Feenberg introduces it in terms that clearly echo the Frankfurt School's definition of modern instrumental reason:

An effective hegemony need not be imposed in a continuing struggle between self-conscious agents but one that is reproduced unreflectively by the standard beliefs and practices of the society it dominates. Tradition and religion played that role for millennia; today, forms of rationality supply the hegemonic beliefs and practices.

In modern societies being instrumentally rational is common sense and capitalist efficiency is a value that we all strive to maintain. Failure to do so is widely perceived as evidence of some kind of defect, perhaps even immorality. [...] Hegemonic technological rationality enframes the judgements made about technology about key players in the design and implementation process, making some technologies appear sensible and obvious to them while others seem inherently less interesting or likely to succeed. The people making these kinds of choices [...] operate within a horizon that is set by this hegemonic rationality; they make decisions and judgements, but always within the parameters set by this ordering of the world. When presented with alternative designs they assess them in terms of the hegemonic technological rationality as it applies to their situation. They look for efficiency and they understand this in terms of enhanced control over the production process because this is the way to reduce costs and maximize desired outputs. [...]

[...] Management has long understood that using the iron fist is best only as a last resort. It is far cheaper to try to induce workers to cooperate through manipulating their fears and dreams. This is done through programs to foster identification with the company, as against other companies and the world; programs to reward individual contributions (even if they result in others losing their jobs); fostering competition between workers; and keeping open hopes for advancement. In order to fight unionization and maintain workforce stability, the model flexible plants do pay near the top of the industry scale, which is usually more than the average wage in the surrounding area because the companies locate in lowwage areas. But these plants also rely on speed-ups, outsourcing, automation, and extensive use of temporary workers to limit the total number of their higher-paid workers and keep up hopes among the lower-paid workers that they will be selected to move into the higher-paid group.

[...] Just as industrial capitalism had broken with the substance of slavery-based merchant capitalism, 'cognitive' capitalism, which is now beginning to appear and which produces and domesticates the living on a scale never before seen, in no sense eliminates the world of material industrial production. Rather it re-arranges it, re-organises it and alters the positioning of its nerve centres. Financialisation is the expression of this remodelling, of this reformatting, of material production. [...]

[...] Property rights are a body of social conventions and norms that permit the transformation of what is valuable for any given society, group or individual into an economic good capable of monetary valuation (price) or non-monetary valuation (donation), or of a market exchange (private goods) or non-profit exchange (public goods). [...]

Since it has to do with knowledge-goods, financialisation appears in a first phase to remove the obstacles that these present to their transformation into goods that are rival, divisible and excludable. But, in the era of the digital, it calls for the creation of enclosures by means of new property rights and digital management rights. These new enclosures have a depressive effect on the intensity and quality of innovation. The alternative strategies consist in the creation of new public spaces and conditions for free public access to the digital commons [...]

[...] The economy is not based on knowledge as such (although society itself is), but on the exploitation of knowledge. With the digital revolution [...] codified knowledge (databases, software) becomes information-goods and public knowledge. Economic models which since industrial capitalism have been based on the sale of them are in serious crisis: digitisation has drastically downgraded the old implementation of intellectual property rights, while the advantages gained in the field of codified knowledge are lasting for less and less time. [...]

[...] Internet platforms like Facebook and Twitter provide access to means of communication without selling access or content as commodity, yet they do not stand outside the commodity form, but rather commodify users' data. In return for the commodification of data, Facebook and Twitter provide a means of communication to their users. These means could be considered as being in-kind goods provided as return for the users granting the companies the possibility to access and commodify personal data. [...] users on Facebook and Twitter do not receive a universal medium of exchange, but rather one specific means of communication. By giving users access to their platforms, Facebook and Twitter do not provide general means of survival, but instead access to a particular means of communication whose use serves their own profit interests. This is not to say that I argue for payments to users of corporate Internet platforms that are advertising-financed. I rather argue for the creation of non-commercial non-profit alternatives that altogether escape, sublate and struggle against the commodity form.

[...] Whereas wage labour is coerced by the threat of physical violence (the threat is death because of the lack of being able to purchase and consume goods), audience labour is coerced by ideological violence (the threat is to have fewer social contacts because of missing information from the media and missing communication capacities that are needed for sustaining social relations). Audiences are under the ideological control of capitalists who possess control over the means of communication. If for example people stop using Facebook and social networking sites, they may miss certain social contact opportunities. They can refuse to become a Facebook worker, just like an employee can refuse to work for a wage, but they may as a consequence suffer social disadvantages in society. Commercial media coerce individuals to use them. The more monopoly power they possess, the easier it gets to exert this coercion over media consumers and users.

Social media users are double objects of commodification: they are commodities themselves and through this commodification their consciousness becomes, while online, permanently exposed to commodity logic in the form of advertisements. Most online time is advertising time. [...] advertisements do not necessarily represent consumers' real needs and desires because the ads are based on calculated assumptions, whereas needs are much more complex and spontaneous. The ads mainly reflect marketing decisions and economic power relations. They do not simply provide information about products as offers to buy, but present information about products of powerful companies.

[...] Money is the dominant medium of capitalism [...] Those who control and accumulate money power are therefore equipped with a resource that puts them at a strategic advantage. This means that alternative online platforms in capitalism are facing power inequalities that stem from the asymmetric distributions of money and other resources that are inherent in capitalism. Practically this means that alternative platforms have less money and fewer users than Facebook. [...]

[...] Other labour-intensive apps--such as TaskRabbit, which allows users to hire people for short-term gigs as errand runners--work not because they make unskilled labour vastly more productive, but because unskilled labour is abundant and cheap enough to make it more economical to harness workers to do unproductive jobs: waiting in queues, for example.

[...] Uber's PR materials like to point out that the service is great for human drivers, offering them access to flexible, well-paid work. To investors, meanwhile, Uber emphasizes its desire to be a pioneer in the development of autonomous cab fleets.

The digital revolution makes it far easier and cheaper to keep an eye on certain sorts of workers and assess their performance. As a result, the boundaries of the typical firm have shifted. [...]

That the vectoralist class has replaced capital as the dominant exploiting class can be seen in the form that the leading corporations take. These firms divest themselves of their productive capacity, as this is no longer a source of power. They rely on a competing mass of capitalist contractors for the manufacture of their products. Their power lies in monopolizing intellectual property--patents, copyrights and trademarks--and the means of reproducing their value--the vectors of communication. The privatization of information becomes the dominant, rather than a subsidiary, aspect of commodified life.

The commodification of information means the enslavement of the world to the interests of those whose margins depend on information's scarcity, the vectoral class. The many potential benefits of free information are subordinated to the exclusive benefits in the margin. The infinite virtuality of the future is subordinated to the production and representation of futures that are repetitions of the same commodity form.

Production produces not only the object as commodity, but also the subject who appears as its consumer, even though it is actually its producer. Under vectoralist rule, society becomes indeed a "social factory" which makes subjects as much as objects out of the transformation of nature into second nature. "Labouring processes have moved outside the factory walls to invest the entire society." The capitalist class profits from the producing class as producer of objects. The vectoralist class profits from the producing class as consumer of its own subjectivity in commodified form.

The vetoralist class contributes, unwittingly, to the development of the vectoral world within which the gift as the limit to property could return, but soon recognizes its error. As the vectoral economy, develops, less and less of it takes the form of a public space of open and free gift exchange, and more and more of it takes the form of commodified production for private sale. The vectoralist class can grudgingly accommodate some margin of public information, as the price it pays to the state for the furtherance of its main interests. But the vectoralist class quite rightly sees in the gift a challenge not just to its profits but to its very existence. The gift economy is the virtual proof for the parasitic and superfluous nature of vectoralists as a class.

What may be free from the commodity form altogether is not land, not capital, but information. All other forms of property are exclusive. The ownership by one excludes, by definition, the ownership by another. The class relation may be mitigated, but not overcome. The vectoralist class sees in the development of vectoral means of production and distribution the ultimate means to commodify the globe through the commodification of information. But the hacker class can realize from the same historic opportunity that the means are at hand to decommodify information. Information is the gift that may be shared without diminishing anything but its scarcity. Information is that which can escape the commodify form altogether. Information escapes the commodity as history and history as commodification. It frees abstraction from its commodified phase.

The vectoralist class discovers--irony of ironies!--a scarcity of scarcity. It struggles to find new "business models" for information, but ends up settling for its only reliable means of extracting a surplus from its artificial scarcity, through the formation of monopolies over every branch of its production. Stocks, flows and vectors of information are brought together in vast enterprises, with the sole purpose of extracting a surplus through the watertight commodification of all elements of the process. By denying to the producing classes any free means of reproducing their own culture, the vectoralist class hopes to extract a surplus from selling back to the producing classes their own souls. But the very strength of the vectoralist class--its capacity to monopolize the vector, points to its weakness. The only lack is the lack of necessity. The only necessity is the overcoming of necessity. The only scarcity is of scarcity itself.

[...] When I last checked, there were more than 600 castles available, with prices often approaching $10,000 a night. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but the techno-utopianism behind its origins and narrative has long been passed by economic reality. In some cases, the sharing economy has turned what might have once been a casual favor into a financial transaction. That is hardly the stuff of "sharing." In most cases, sharing-economy businesses are just businesses. Brian and Joe didn't share their spare air mattresses; they rented them out. To the extent that there is an underlying ideology, it is not about sharing or creating community around the breakfast table; it is the economic theory of neoliberalism, encouraging the free flow of goods and services in a market without government regulation.

[...] Uber is developing a ride-sharing model that aspires to take 1 million cars off the streets of London while creating 100,000 jobs. Even if it comes near a fraction of this goal, it is still all for the good for reducing carbon emissions and for employment.

[...] "Before Uber there was in Milan, Italy, in Lyon, France, two or three mini-cab companies that used to compete [...] They've all ceased to exist. The same thing will happen all over the world. You will still have drivers. But that's the most unskilled job in the line. The rest of the money will flow to Uber shareholders in Silicon Valley. So a huge chunk of the Italian GDP just moved to Silicon Valley. With these platforms, the Valley has become like ancient Rome. It exerts tribute from all its provinces. The tribute is the fact that it owns these platform businesses. Every classified ad in Italy used to go into a town newspaper. Now it goes to Google. Pinterest will basically replace magazine sales. Now Uber dominates transport."

[...]

This is an alarming trend, and to an extent, Charlie is right. There's value leaving local hubs and heading to Silicon Valley. But the drain is mitigated by a few factors. First, there is the near-inevitable fact that the large platforms in Silicon Valley will be going public. Their ownership will be much more distributed than those locally owned cab companies, and many of the beneficiaries of those early investments are pension funds that invest in the big venture capital and private equity funds. Those pension funds manage the retirement funds for people in the working class like teachers, police officers, and other civil servants. This doesn't fully account for the loss, and it doesn't negate the irony that the people driving cars for Uber don't have pensions, but it's worth noting in the face of Charlie's predictions. Also important is the fact that there is indeed new value being created in local hubs whenever platforms like Airbnb become an option.

The opportunity to work on a project-by-project basis involves trade-offs. There is more independence and flexibility but fewer worker protections and rights. This too tends to skew toward the preferences of younger workers who are less focused on entitlement programs and who don't enter the workforce expecting to have just a few employers over their lifetime.

This might be manageable if the laborer is providing very expensive, highly sought-after engineering skills, but if you are a janitor, having to migrate from a full-time employer with benefits such as workers' compensation and health insurance to brokering your services on a sharing-economy platform will lead to less well-being. When the janitor has to list his spare bedroom on Airbnb, it is not supplemental income--it is survival income. As workers enter middle age and have kids, the need for benefits grows. If more of the labor force is sharing economy-based temporary employment without benefits, it hammers the working class and pushes them into safety net programs. For all the efficiencies of the sharing economy, toward the end of the life or if a worker becomes sick or injured, the responsibility of government increases. Worker protections have shifted from employers to taxpayer-funded government solutions.

Yet as these economic changes take place [...] the role of the state as a regulator has been diminished.

As the sharing economy grows as a share of the total economy, the safety net needs to grow with it. It's a necessary cost for allowing loose labor markets to work without much regulation, and if it generates enormous amounts of wealth for the platform owners, then the platform owners can and should help pay for added costs to society.

Who owns the data is as important a question as who owned the land during the agricultural age and who owned the factory during the industrial age. Data is the raw material of the information age.

Correlations made by big data are likely to reinforce negative bias. Because big data often relies on historical data or at least the status quo, it can easily reproduce discrimination against disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities. The propensity models used in many algorithms can bake in a bias against someone who lived in the zip code of a low-income neighborhood at any point in his or her life. If an algorithm used by human resources companies queries your social graph and positively weighs candidates with the most existing connections to a workforce, it makes it more difficult to break in in the first place. In effect, these algorithms can hide bias behind a curtain of code.

[...] it is largely unregulated because we need it for economic growth and because efforts to try and regulate it have tended not to work; the technologies are too far-reaching and are not built to recognize the national boundaries of our world's 196 nation-states.

Yet would it be best to try to shut down these technologies entirely if we could? No. Big data simultaneously helps helps solve global challenges while creating an entirely new set of challenges. [...]

[...] yes, some of us might find ingenious engineering solutions to resist insidious marketing, but in all this celebration of modern technology, shouldn’t we also do something about the marketing itself? Why force consumers to monitor themselves and hone their willpower techniques if we can make it harder for food companies to sell unhealthy food or target children? Instead, political action all but disappears; rather than reforming the system, we just tinker with ourselves and tend to our reservoirs of willpower the way Swiss bankers tend to their vaults.

[...] 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. [...]

[...] 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.

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. [...]

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.

[...] 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.

[...] 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.

[...] Our mobile phones pretend to be about fulfilling every desire [...] yet what is much scarier than the fact that the user can fulfill desire via the mobile phone is the possibility that the phone creates those desires in the first place. While the user thinks they are doing what they want, as if desires already exist and are simply facilitated by the device, in fact Google has an even greater power: the ability to create and organize desire itself. [...]

More benignly, perhaps, these companies influence the choices we make ourselves. Recommendation engines at Amazon and YouTube affect an automated familiarity, gently suggesting offerings they think we’ll like. But don’t discount the significance of that “perhaps.” The economic, political, and cultural agendas behind their suggestions are hard to unravel. As middlemen, they specialize in shifting alliances, sometimes advancing the interests of customers, sometimes suppliers: all to orchestrate an online world that maximizes their own profits.

We pay no money for Google’s services. But someone pays for its thousands of engineers, and that someone is advertisers. Nearly all the company’s revenue comes from marketers eager to reach the targeted audiences that Google delivers so abundantly. We pay with our attention and with our data, the raw material of marketing. [...]

From the tech and telecom craze of the late 1990s to house price escalation from 2002 to 2006, asset bubbles are a predictable consequence of black box finance. Insiders who understand their true dynamics can sell at the top, reaping enormous windfalls. But their gains represent “a claim on future wealth that neither had been nor was to be produced.” By creating the illusion of enormous value in securities like CDOs and CDSes, black box financiers make their own fees (ranging from a fraction of a percent to over 30 percent in the case of some hedge funds) seem trivial in comparison. When the mirage dissipates, the desert of zero productive gains becomes clear. But in this harsh new economic reality, the money “earned” by the speculators has all the more purchasing power, arrayed against the smaller incomes of those who did not take advantage of the bubble.

In the context of massive Internet firms, competition is unlikely. Most start-ups today aim to be bought by a company like Google or Facebook, not to displace them. [...]

However ambitiously American finance regulators may set standards, their efforts are compromised by the internationalization of major firms, which plead that any stringent national standard for recording information may make it harder to do business overseas. They want to wait for international coordination—a process that could take decades. Or they could simply move their trading overseas.

It is not helpful to have politicians across the political spectrum meekly submitting to this technolibertarianism—assuming that bureaucrats, and by extension themselves, are inherently incapable of influencing technical innovation. We must curb the tendency to reify the tech giants—to assume that their largely automated ways of processing disputes or handling customer inquiries are, inevitably, the way things are and must always be. Until we do, we enforce upon ourselves an unnecessary helplessness, and a self-incurred tutelage.

The arbitrariness of many forms of reputation creation is becoming clearer all the time. I will not recapitulate here the problems of discrimination (racial, political, economic, and competitive) that we examined earlier. Unfairness in today’s Internet industries should be obvious by now, and is another important reason to be wary of reification. “The Internet” is a human invention, and can be altered by humans. [...]

Our technologies are just as much a product of social, market, and political forces as they are the outgrowth of scientific advance. They are intimately embedded in social practices that rely on human judgment. [...]

If one tries to summarize all of the things that consumption is and is not, it seems clear that to Baudrillard consumption is not, contrary to conventional wisdom, something that individuals do and through which they find enjoyment, satisfaction and fulfilment. Rather, consumption is a structure (or Durkheimian social fact) that is external to and coercive over individuals. While it can and does take the forms of a structural organization, a collective phenomenon, a morality, it is above all else a coded system of signs. Individuals are coerced into using that system. The use of that system via consumption is an important way in which people communicate with one another. The ideology associated with the system leads people to believe, falsely in Baudrillard's view, that they are affluent, fulfilled, happy and liberated.

Summarizing his position, we may say that the basic problem of contemporary capitalism is no longer the contradiction between 'profit maximization' and the 'rationalization of production' (from the point of view of the entrepreneur), but that between a potentially unlimited productivity (at the level of the technostructure) and the need to dispose of the product. It becomes vital for the system in this phase to control not just the apparatus of production, but consumer demand; to control not just prices, but what will be demanded at those prices. The 'general effect'--either prior to the act of production (surveys, market research) or subsequent to it (advertising, marketing, packaging)--is to 'shift the locus of decision in the purchase of goods from the consumer where it is beyond control to the firm where it is subject to control'. [...]

The new populist leaders recognize that they aspire to national leadership in an era in which national sovereignty is in crisis. The most striking symptom of this crisis of sovereignty is that no modern nation-state controls what could be called its national economy. [...]

This, then, is what the leaders of the new authoritarian populisms have in common: the recognition that none of them can truly control their national economies, which are hostages to foreign investors, global agreements, transnational finance, mobile labour and capital in general. [...]

[...] In the US form, progressive neoliberalism is an alliance of mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism and LGBTP rights) on the side, and high-end 'symbolic' and service-based sectors of business (Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood) on the other. In this alliance, progressive forces are effectively joined with the forces of cognitive capitalism, especially financialization. [...]

But are Facebook users productive workers? They are certainly not less important for Facebook’s capital accumulation than its paid employees because without users Facebook would immediately stop making profits and producing commodities. Facebook’s commodity is not its platform that can be used without charges. It rather sells advertising space in combination with access to users. An algorithm selects users and allows individually targeting ads based on keywords and search criteria that Facebook’s clients identify. Facebook’s commodity is a portion/space of a user’s screen/profile that is filled with ad clients’ commodity ideologies. The commodity is presented to users and sold to ad clients either when the ad is presented (pay-per-view) or when the ad is clicked (pay-per-click). The user gives attention to his/her profile, wall and other users’ profiles and walls. For specific time periods parts of his/her screen are filled with advertising ideologies that are with the help of algorithms targeted to his/her interests. The prosumer commodity is an ad space that is highly targeted to user activities and interests. The users’ constant online activity is necessary for running the targeting algorithms and for generating viewing possibilities and attention for ads. The ad space can therefore only exist based on user activities that are the labour that create the social media prosumer commodity.

[...] Practically this means that a lot of companies want to advertise on Facebook and calculate social media advertising costs into their commodity prices. [...]

[...] It is not a direct forced separation, but an indirect one. The indirect forcing factors are basically the disadvantages that you might experience when being outside a network platform such as Facebook, for example the loss of job-opportunities, personal connections, social relations, and other immaterial assets.

[...] surveillance becomes a means of commodifying the information that users produce. [...] Such surveillance [...] is rooted in a capitalist desire to commodify information. [...] While capitalism is conditioned by the requirement for privacy (for ex., of bank accounts and holdings) to legitimate wealth inequality, it also promotes surveillance of workers in order to tighten control over them and render the accumulation process more efficient.

The dominant positions of several social media, including Facebook and Google have been considered as clear examples of platform imperialism. While these sites can offer participants entertainment and a way to socialize, the social relations present on a site like Facebook can obscure economic relations that reflect larger patterns of capitalist development in the digital age. [...] In other words, a few U.S.-based platforms dominate the global order, which has resulted in the concentration of capital in a few hands within major TNCs and start-ups. [...]

[...] As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e., the relation of capitalists on the one hand, and wage-workers on the other, so reproduction on a progressive scale, i.e., accumulation, reproduces the capital-relation on a progressive scale, more capitalists or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage-workers at that. The reproduction of a mass of labour power, which must incessantly reincorporate itself with capital for that capital’s self-expansion; which cannot get free from capital, and whose enslavement to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells itself, this reproduction of labour power forms, in fact, an essential of the reproduction of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat.

What is intended is a permanent revolution. Can society be permanently reconstructed along these lines? Is neoliberalism hegemonic?

The protests are growing. Weighty professional voices are ranged against structural reforms, and the speed and scale of cuts in a fragile economy. There are pauses, rethinks and u-turns. [...] What happens next is not pregiven.

Hegemony is a tricky concept and provokes muddled thinking. No project achieves ‘hegemony’ as a completed project. It is a process, not a state of being. No victories are permanent or final. Hegemony has constantly to be ‘worked on’, maintained, renewed, revised. Excluded social forces, whose consent has not been won, whose interests have not been taken into account, form the basis of countermovements, resistance, alternative strategies and visions … and the struggle over a hegemonic system starts anew. They constitute what Raymond Williams called ‘the emergent’ - and are the reason why history is never closed but maintains an open horizon towards the future.

That situation resembles feudalism more than a bit, with the added freedom (read: risk) that individual drivers don’t even have the status of serfs. They are “free” to choose their lords, to whom they don’t even belong. The platform is an adventure in extreme forms of expropriation set against the backdrop of a slowing economy, what Marxist economist Robert Brenner calls “the long downturn” since the 1970s. [...] There’s still a centralized federal government, but its authority is attenuated by platform monopolists. The platform confuses capital-flow and social form, rearranging the relationship of profit to community (and therefore class), and of intelligence to organization. With the incumbency effect that massive data hoarding affords companies like the Four, we appear to be looking at something like a set of smart monopolies [...]

Are these platforms skimming rent off capital and labor? Or do they represent a fundamental shift in economics, a new Industrial Revolution? [...] Cognitive capitalism, to use Yann Moulier Boutang’s term, might be less about allowing creativity to organize the economic cycle than about siphoning value from socio-cultural activity as such. [...]

In their emphasis on the digital world’s medievalism, Foer and Galloway surprisingly join a chorus of Italian Marxists and cultural theorists who think the digital economy has brought a form of pre-modern economy back into capitalism. Rent has returned to a central role, as Carlo Vercellone argues. When growth levels off, ownership takes precedence over entrepreneurship. Rather than producing new value, the platforms simply coordinate virtual properties and charge for their use. But the properties are not in meatspace or cyberspace alone, which means the owners can set the rent at will. Think of Uber, which is only now beginning to try to create a more stable set of drivers (something like employees). Trying to keep drivers driving means negotiating with them, but the results are not encouraging. By denying their status as a firm with employees, Uber devolves the risk of enterprise onto their “contractors,” and then argues those contractors should be loyal to the platform’s internal, algorithmic assessment of its own success, since their ability to drive at all is based on Uber continuing to exist.

This is not, however, a book of prescriptions. No glorious blueprint for the left resides within its pages. Rather it brings together crucial perspectives for understanding capitalism and the world we inhabit. While the assessment of capitalism and its opponents may seem bleak, the conclusion of the book is not. The way forward is to be found by arming ourselves with unsparing analysis of the predicament we find ourselves in, while having the fortitude to once again think ambitiously about broad emancipatory change.

You simply couldn't have global production with out the role that finance plays just in this respect, and I'm not even getting into the role that finance plays in terms of venture capital, which was very important in terms of the development of information and technology revolution we just lived through; or the role it plays in terms of facilitating investment. You could do the same for the kind of role that finance plays in terms of making indebted consumers into viable consumers. [....] you can go even further to look at the role that finance plays via channeling workers' savings into pension funds and the role those pension funds play in investing in stock markets, investing in derivatives, and so on, which has to be traced through how that links to production.

[...] You're creating a global capitalism within which the American state and American capital have structural power.

The structural power comes from the fact that that the U.S. is still the dominant country in terms of technology. It's increasingly playing a crucial role in terms of what I raised before--business services, accounting, legal, consulting, engineering, and of course finance. There's more concentration of American power in finance than there is in other sectors. So it's very important not to see imperialism as being only about territorial intervention. And it's very important to understand that this kind of empire grows through actually spreading production, in a sense sharing production globally in a particular way.

[...] For Fukuyama, the freedom in liberalism and the choice in politics do not include the freedom to choose to oppose the singularity of a global market system, even to the meager extent of opposing by strengthening the nation state, let alone by daring to choose something other than capitalism. His is the freedom to choose after all the major political, economic, and social decisions have already been made.

[...] Even as myths of cyberspace reveal the unique power that people attribute to this age, these myths also mask the continuities that make the power we observe today, for example in the global market and in globe-spanning companies like Microsoft and IBM, very much a deepening and extension of old forms of power. These patterns of mutual constitution between culture and political economy, specifically between myth and power, suggest not a mythic radical disjunction from history, but a strengthening, albeit in a different mythic client, of old forms of power.

Looking at the history of technology literally puts us in our place by suggesting that rather than ending time, space, and social relations as we have known them, the rise of cyberspace amounts to just another in a series of interesting, but ultimately banal exercises in the extension of human tools. They are potentially very profound extensions, but not enough to warrant claims about the end of anything, other than the end of a chapter in a seemingly never ending story. [...]

Digitization takes place along with the process of commodification or the transformation of use to exchange or market value. The expansion of the commodity form provides what amounts to the material embodiment for digitization. It is used first and foremost to expand the commodification of information and entertainment content, enlarge markets in the audiences that take in and make use of digitized communication, and deepen the commodification of labor involved in the production, distribution and exchange of communication. Digitization takes place in the context of powerful commercial forces and also serves the advance the overall process of commodification worldwide. In other words, commercial forces deepen and extend the process of digitization because it enables them to expand the commodity form in communication. From a cultural or mythic perspective, cyberspace may be seen as the end of history, geography, and politics. But from a political economic perspective, cyberspace results from the mutual constitution of digitization and commodification.

Digitization expands the commodification of content by extending opportunities to measure and monitor, package and repackage entertainment and information. [...] Initially, commodification was based on a relatively inflexible system of delivering a batch of channels into the home and having viewers pay for the receiver and for a markup on products advertised over the air. The system did not account for different use of the medium; nor did it make any clear connection between viewing and purchasing. It amounted to a Fordist system of delivering general programming to a mass audience which was marketed to advertisers for a price per thousand viewers. Each step along the way to the digitzation of television has refined the commmodification of content, allowing for the flow to be "captured" or, more precisely, for the commodity to be measured, monitored and packaged in increasingly more specific and customised ways. [...]

[...] It demonstrates how deeply entrenched the largest internet companies and their surveillance model is with the profit system. They’re just in the bone marrow of modern capitalism — of our modern political economy. To go after that is basically going after the whole system, in a way. It would require that sort of organizing campaign.

Or to put it in terms of media analysis: no significant economic interests wish to open up critical public examination of the surveillance model of capitalism, so that means none of our political establishment — Republicans or Democrats — has any incentive to go there. Those few journalists who remain have little to work with from the official sources they rely upon, so the matter dies. It is no longer “news.”

Most of the people who designed the internet didn’t want it to be a commercial medium, and that’s why they made it that way. The problem with that for capitalism was that it didn’t make for a very successful commercial model. In the 1990s, there was endless talk of locating the “killer app,” the digital goose that would lay the golden eggs. Capitalists knew the internet was changing everything, but it seemed resistant to commercial exploitation. By the middle of the 1990s, Madison Avenue and the corporate community realized that if they were going to really have the internet be the nervous system of modern society, they had to make it advertiser friendly, they had to make it profit friendly. They had to commercialize it, and the crucial thing to doing that was introducing the capacity and the protocols for surveillance, knowing who exactly is online, everything about them. That began in earnest in the late 1990s and changed the entire logic of the internet — turned it on its head in many respects.

[...] here was a technology that conceivably could give corporations infinitely more power over consumers, not simply to advertise products, but to make sales. But that required wrestling away people’s ability to maintain their privacy, and doing so without their awareness of what was being done to them.

This movement was led, appropriately enough, by Procter & Gamble. The key was to find a way of tracking people’s internet activity so you could know who they were, where they were, and you could collect data on them. It didn’t begin all at once. It wasn’t an overnight 180-degree turn, but that process was underway by the mid-nineties, and then it was expanded to where we are today over the next decade.

The great Internet monopolies of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google (Alphabet), and Microsoft are different. They are global firms and do not depend upon government licenses for the market power. At the same time, they have extremely close relations with the US government and much of their work relies upon research and innovations first developed under military auspices. In just two decades, these five firms have conquered capitalism in an unprecedented manner. If you look at the largest companies in America today in terms of market value, the top five companies in the United States and the world in terms of market value are, in no particular order, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. They’re the top five companies in the world in terms of market value. It’s astonishing what a dominant role they play. They blow everyone out of the water and they are growing at breakneck speed.

I think that ten of the top twenty-four corporations in the US are internet companies, and fifteen of the top forty. The number of internet firms drops off sharply once you get past the top forty. There is not much of a middle class or even upper middle class in digital capitalism.

[...] these companies then undertake this very close surveillance, which then becomes available to the highest bidder for commercial purposes.

[...]

[...] alongside this centralization of control there is also the fact that journalism itself is dying. The internet hasn’t caused its death, but it has accelerated it, and eliminated any hope for a successful commercial news media system that can serve the information needs of the entire population.

The roots of its decline stretch back decades. For the first hundred or so years in American history, newspapers were heavily subsidized by the federal government, in order to encourage a rich array of news media. No one at that time thought the profit motive operating in the “free” market alone would be sufficient to provide the caliber of news media the constitution required. This was done primarily through free or nominal distribution of newspapers by the post office — almost all newspapers were distributed by post in the early republic — and also by printing contracts handed out with the explicit intent to help support different newspapers, by branches of government. In combination, the annual government subsidy of journalism as a percentage of GDP in the 1840s would be worth around $35 billion in today’s economy.

By the late nineteenth century, the commercial system consolidated whereby advertising provided the lion’s share of the revenues, and the state subsidies declined in importance and, in many cases, disappeared. Publishing newspapers, building journalism empires, began to generate massive fortunes while continuing to provide owners with immense political power. This is the context in which professional journalism — purportedly nonpartisan, opinion-free, politically neutral and fact-obsessed — was spawned in the first few decades of the twentieth century.

[...]

The basic problem is that the giant internet companies — especially Facebook and Google — are taking away the advertising money that would’ve traditionally gone to some newspaper or journalism-producing entity. But Facebook and Google aren’t using this money to invest in more journalists or news reporting.

[...]

This looked like the transition, say, in the year 2000, that we would slowly be seeing. It wasn’t clear we would lose commercial journalism. But what happened with the surveillance model is that no one buys ads on a website. You don’t go to the New York Times and say, “Hey, I want to buy an ad,” and hope and pray my target audience comes and looks at your website and sees my ad. Instead, you go to Google or Facebook or aol , and you say, “Hey, I want to reach every American male in this income group between the age of 30 and 34 who might be interested in buying a new car in the next three months,” and aol will locate every one of those men, wherever they are online, and your ad will appear on whatever website they go to, usually straight away. They will find them.

That means the content producers, in this case the news media, don’t get a cut anymore. Those advertising dollars used to subsidize most of their work. Now, if they do get an ad on your site, they get much less for it, and they only get it for those users who are in the target audience of the person placing the ad, not everyone who goes to their site. If you and I were to go to the same site, we’d get different ads, probably, working for different products. The amount of money that the actual website gets is infinitesimal compared to what it would be if they got the whole amount, like in the good old days.

The commercial model’s gone, which is why journalism’s dying, why there are very few working journalists left. No rational capitalist is investing in journalism because of its profit potential. To the extent they invest, it tends usually be some hedge-fund douchebags buying dying media and stripping them for parts, or some billionaire like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post or Sheldon Adelson buying the Las Vegas Review-Journal, always at fire-sale prices. The point of the exercise in these instances is to use the newspaper to shape the broader political narrative to the owner’s liking, with very few other voices in opposition. That is hardly a promising development for an open society.

No, I don’t think that can work. These markets tend toward monopoly. They’re easy to capture because you get tremendous network effects, which basically means that whoever is bigger gets the whole game, because all the users have tremendous incentives to go to the largest network. All the smaller networks disappear. When social media was starting up, there was initially great competition between Facebook and Myspace and one or two others. But pretty soon, once everyone starts going to Facebook, no one’s going to Myspace, because Facebook has so many more people on it. When you’re on social media, you go where everyone is. So all the other ones disappear and Facebook is all alone, and they’re left with a monopoly. That’s a network effect. McDonald’s hamburgers never got that. You didn’t have to go to McDonald’s to get a hamburger. You could go to other places still, so Burger King and Wendy’s can compete with them.

When you combine that, then, with traditional concentration techniques in capitalism, the massive barriers to entry — Amazon, Google, Microsoft, all five of these companies have to spend billions and billions of dollars annually on these enormous server farms and computer farms and their cloud, and in the case of Amazon, they have huge warehouses — that, along with network effects, pretty much precludes any lasting competition. So the idea that you can break up companies like that into thirty or forty smaller parts and have competitive markets doesn’t make any sense. These are natural monopolies, so to speak.

So that leaves two reforms. One is, you let them remain private, but you regulate them like the phone company was in America for a long time, AT&T. You let them make profits but hold them to public regulations, in exchange for letting them have a natural monopoly. To me, it doesn’t take much study to see that this is not realistic. These are huge, extremely powerful entities. The idea that you’re going to regulate them and get them to do stuff that’s not profitable to them — it’s ridiculous. Do you think you’re going to take on the five largest companies in the world and have that be successful? There’s no evidence to suggest that.

The other option is to nationalize them or municipalize them. You take them out of the capital-accumulation process, you set them up as independent, nonprofit, noncommercial concerns.

That’s probably the case. But, ironically, what I’m proposing hasn’t always been associated with the anticapitalist left. One person who wrote on this exact subject was Henry Calvert Simons, a laissez-faire economist from the University of Chicago, who was Milton Friedman’s mentor. He opposed the New Deal. He lived in the mid-twentieth century. Not a fan of labor unions or social security — a pure, free-market capitalist. But he wrote widely that if you have a monopoly that can’t be broken into small bits, the idea that you can regulate it is nonsense. This monopoly is not only going to screw over consumers, it’s going to screw over legitimate firms, legitimate capitalist enterprises, because it’s going to charge them higher prices. He said, the only thing you can do if you believe in capitalism is nationalize them. Take them out of the profit system. Otherwise, they’ll completely distort the marketplace and corrupt the system into crony capitalism. I think that’s true, whether you believe in capitalism or, like me, you are a socialist.

But as difficult as it may seem today, this is going to be an unavoidable fight. Cracks in the façade like the Edward Snowden revelations and the Cambridge Analytic scandal are chipping away at the legitimacy and popular acceptance of these monopolies, but we have a long way to go. The place to begin is to identify the problem and talk about it and get it on the table. Don’t assume the issue cannot be raised because there is no ready-made functional alternative in hand. In unpredictable and turbulent times like these, issues can explode before our eyes, but it helps if we lay the groundwork in advance.

Once you start talking about taking the center of the capitalist economy and taking it out of capitalism, well, then I think you’re getting, like you said, you’re getting to very radical turf, and that’s exactly where we’re pointed — where we have to be pointed.

The simplest way, as I pointed out in response to Weisenthal’s query, would be for cities to adopt regulatory codes that only permit ride-sharing by worker-owned firms. Uber would then seamlessly become a software provider.

This sort of restriction isn’t unprecedented. Many states forbid corporations from engaging in certain kinds of farming; many exclude for-profit companies from certain kinds of gambling and credit counseling businesses; and federal restrictions on foreign ownership exist in a wide range of industries.

WTF? Without owning a single room, Airbnb has more rooms on offer than some of the largest hotel groups in the world. Airbnb has under 3,000 employees, while Hilton has 152,000. New forms of corporate organization are outcompeting businesses based on best practices that we’ve followed for the lifetimes of most business leaders.

Meanwhile, in hopes that “the market” will deliver jobs, central banks have pushed ever more money into the system, hoping that somehow this will unlock business investment. But instead, corporate profits have reached highs not seen since the 1920s, corporate investment has shrunk, and more than $30 trillion of cash is sitting on the sidelines. The magic of the market is not working.

We are at a very dangerous moment in history. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a global elite is eroding the power and sovereignty of nation-states while globe-spanning technology platforms are enabling algorithmic control of firms, institutions, and societies, shaping what billions of people see and understand and how the economic pie is divided. At the same time, income inequality and the pace of technology change are leading to a populist backlash featuring opposition to science, distrust of our governing institutions, and fear of the future, making it ever more difficult to solve the problems we have created.

Replacing Ownership with Access. In the long run, Uber and Lyft are not competing with taxicab companies, but with car ownership. After all, if you can summon a car and driver at low cost via the touch of a button on your phone, why should you bother owning one at all, especially if you live in the city? Uber and Lyft do for car ownership what music services like Spotify did for music CDs, and Netflix and Amazon Prime did for DVDs. They are replacing ownership with access. [...]

Uber and Lyft also replace ownership with access for the companies themselves. Drivers provide their own cars, earning additional income from a resource they have already paid for that is often idle, or allowing them to help pay for a resource that they are then able to use in other parts of their lives. Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft avoid the capital expense of owning their own fleets of cars.

[...]

A Platform, Not Just a Company. A traditional business that wants to grow must hire people, invest in plants and equipment, and build out a management hierarchy. Instead, Uber and Lyft have created digital platforms to manage and deploy hundreds of thousands of independent drivers, trusting the marketplace itself to ensure that enough of them show up to work and bring their own equipment with them. (Imagine for a moment that Walmart or McDonald’s didn’t schedule their workers, but simply offered work, trusted enough people to show up, and offered higher wages when there weren’t enough workers to meet demand.) This is a radically different kind of corporate organization.

There are those who argue that Uber and Lyft are simply trying to avoid paying benefits by keeping their workers as independent contractors rather than as employees. It isn’t that simple. Yes, it does save them money, but independent-contractor status is also important to the scalability and flexibility of the model. Unlike taxis, which must be on the road full-time to earn enough to cover the driver’s daily rental fee, the Uber and Lyft model allows many more drivers to work part-time (and to take passenger requests simultaneously from both services), leading to an ebb and flow of supply that more naturally matches demand. More drivers means better availability for customers, shorter wait times, and far better geographic coverage. These companies are able to provide a five-minute response time over a far larger geographical area than traditional taxi and limousine companies.

Management by Algorithm is central to Uber and Lyft’s business. It would be impossible to marshal the workers, connect drivers and passengers in real time, automatically track and bill every ride, or provide quality control by letting the passengers rate their drivers, without the use of powerful computer algorithms. Creating and deploying these algorithms is the core of what the company does.

Every passenger is required to rate their driver after each trip; drivers also rate passengers. Drivers whose ratings fall below a certain level are dropped from the service. This can be a brutal management regime, but as political scientist Margaret Levi noted to me, from the point of view of passengers, the real-time reputation system acts as a kind of “private regulation” that outperforms traditional municipal taxi regulation in enforcing high standards of safety and customer experience.

These firms thus use technology to eliminate the jobs of what used to be an enormous hierarchy of managers (or a hierarchy of individual firms acting as suppliers), replacing them with a relatively flat network managed by algorithms, network-based reputation systems, and marketplace dynamics. These firms also rely on their network of customers to police the quality of their service. Lyft even uses its network of top-rated drivers to onboard new drivers, outsourcing what once was a crucial function of management.

Similarly, robots seem to have accelerated Amazon’s human hiring. From 2014 through 2016, the company went from having 1,400 robots in its warehouses to 45,000. During the same time frame, it added nearly 200,000 full-time employees. It added 110,000 employees in 2016 alone, most of them in its highly automated fulfillment centers. I have been told that, including temps and subcontractors, 480,000 people work in Amazon distribution and delivery services, with 250,000 more added at peak holiday times. They can’t hire fast enough. Robots allow Amazon to pack more products into the same warehouse footprint, and make human workers more productive. They aren’t replacing people; they are augmenting them.

That is, both traditional companies and “on demand” companies use apps and algorithms to manage workers. But there’s an important difference. Companies using the top-down scheduling approach adopted by traditional low-wage employers have used technology to amplify and enable all the worst features of the current system: shift assignment with minimal affordances for worker input, and limiting employees to part-time work to avoid triggering expensive health benefits. Cost optimization for the company, not benefit to the customer or the employee, is the guiding principle for the algorithm.

By contrast, Uber and Lyft expose data to the workers, not just the managers, letting them know about the timing and location of demand, and letting them choose when and how much they want to work. This gives the worker agency, and uses market mechanisms to get more workers available at periods of peak demand or at times or places where capacity is not normally available.

Meanwhile, there is an incentive to cut income for ordinary workers. Cutting wages drives up net income and thus the price of the stock in which executives are increasingly paid. Those executives who are not motivated by cupidity are held hostage. Any CEO who doesn’t keep growing the share price or who considers other interests than those of the shareholders is liable to lose his or her job or be subject to lawsuits. Even Silicon Valley firms whose founders retain controlling positions in their companies are not immune from pressure. Because so much of the compensation of their employees is now in stock, they can only continue to hire the best talent as long as the stock price continues to rise.

Algorithmically derived knowledge is a new source of asymmetric market power. Hal Varian noted this problem in 1995, writing in a paper called “Economic Mechanism Design for Computerized Agents” that “to function effectively, a computerized agent has to know a lot about its owner’s preferences: e.g., his maximum willingness-to-pay for a good. But if the seller of a good can learn the buyer’s willingness-to-pay, he can make the buyer a take-it-or-leave it offer that will extract all of his surplus.” If the growing complaints of Uber drivers about lower fares, too many competing drivers, and longer wait times between pickups are any indication, Uber is optimizing for passengers and for its own profitability by extracting surplus from drivers.

Once companies take money from venture capitalists, they are committed to aiming for an exit. A typical venture fund is a partnership with a ten-year time horizon. Most of the investments are made within the first two to three years, with some money reserved for additional investment in the companies that are most promising. Once an entrepreneur takes money from a venture capitalist, he or she is promising to sell or go public within the lifetime of the fund. Yet VCs know that the vast majority of their deals will fail. Jon Oringer, the founder and CEO of Shutterstock, put it well in his advice to entrepreneurs: “What venture capital firms do is spread some number of millions of dollars to some number of companies. They’re not really rooting for every single one. All they need is for a few of them to succeed. It’s the way the model works. They have a totally different risk profile than you do. This is your only game in town. For the venture capital firm, it’s one of a hundred games in town.”

The skills needed to take advantage of new technology proliferate and are developed over time through communities of practice that share expertise with each other. Over time, the new skills are routinized and it becomes easier to train lots of people to exercise them. It is at that point that they begin to affect productivity and improve the wages and incomes of large numbers of people.

[...]

[...] As coding becomes routinized, the educational needs of those practicing it become less demanding. For many types of programming, people need the equivalent of vocational training rather than an advanced software engineering or math degree. And that’s exactly what we see with the rise of coding academies and boot camps.

[...] Companies with new technologies are free to disrupt almost any industry they choose—journalism, television, music, manufacturing—so long as they don’t disrupt the financial operating system churning beneath it all. Hell, most of the founders of these digital companies don’t seem to realize this operating system even exists. They are happy to challenge one “vertical” or another, but the last thing they do when they’ve got a winner is challenge the rules of investment banking, their own astronomical valuation, or the IPO through which they cash out. Winning the digital growth game is less a new sort of prosperity than it is a new way to execute business as usual: old wine in a new bottle. It’s not that making money is so wrong; it’s that the premises of venture capital and the stock market—as well as their real effects—are never even questioned. The winners have, in some fundamental way, been duped.

This disproportionate relationship between capital and value—or invested money versus actual revenue—is the hallmark of the dominant digital economy. If anything, the digital economy has laid bare the process by which cash, labor, and productive assets from the real, transactional marketplace are extracted and converted into frozen capital—all in the name of growth. Once money has been “captured” in a stock price, it tends to just sit there as if in a bank vault. This, in turn, puts pressure on the company to make more money, faster, in order to justify the new total value of all the stock. The disparity between a company’s net worth and its revenues gets even more extreme. Strangely enough, the companies do keep growing, but they don’t create or produce any value.

This is why the leading voices today are those that still treat the emerging digital economy as Industrialism 2.0 or, as Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee put it in the title of their respected business book, The Second Machine Age. It’s no wonder such ideas captivate the business community: for all their revolutionary bravado they are actually promising business as usual. Workers will continue to be displaced by automation, corporations will remain the major players in the economic landscape, and it’s up to people to keep up with the pace of technological change if they want to survive. This is not a revolutionary vision but a reactionary one. Everything is supposed to change except the economic platform and its bias toward growth—which is probably the most arbitrary piece in the whole puzzle.

The unsustainable endgame is an economy based entirely on marketing and advertising. In its currently inflated state, the entirety of advertising, marketing, public relations, and associated research still accounts for less than 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), by the very most generous estimates.27 Furthermore, unscrupulous Web site owners have now learned to use robotic ad-viewing programs to juice their revenue from pay-per-click advertising. Most of these bot programs run secretly on the computers of everyday users in the form of malware, a kind of minivirus that co-opts a computer’s processing power. Bots now comprise an estimated 25 percent of all online video ad viewers and 10 percent of all static display ads. In 2015, advertisers are projected to lose $6.3 billion in pay-per-click fees to these imaginary viewers.28 Consider the irony: malware robots watch ads, monitored by automated tracking software that tailors each advertising message to suit the malbots’ automated habits, in a human-free feedback loop of ever-narrowing “personalization.” Nothing of value is created, but billions of dollars are made.

Though ingenious, Lanier’s solution could actually dehumanize things even further. If we are paid chiefly for our data, then we are all performing for the machines instead of one another. We are earning money not for the ways we create value for people but for all the passive activities that happen to be data intensive. Our only value to this digital economy comes from those aspects of ourselves that can be quantified. It may solve the problem of getting a whole bunch of activity back “on the books,” but to what end? So we can register some credits on a balance sheet? Must we accept “the books”—presumably, the double-entry ledger—as the fundamental operating system?

The problem with trying to get all human activity back on the books is that the books themselves are not neutral. They are artifacts of a very specific moment in human history—the beginning of the Renaissance—when the two-column ledger was instituted and everything came to be understood as a credit or a debit in a zero-sum game of capital management. Feeding more activity to the ledger simply cedes more of humanity and business alike to a growth-centric industrial model that was invented to thwart us to begin with.

Besides, learning code is hard, particularly for adults who don’t remember their algebra and haven’t been raised thinking algorithmically. Learning code well enough to be a competent programmer is even harder. Although I certainly believe that any member of our highly digital society should be familiar with how these platforms work, universal code literacy won’t solve our employment crisis any more than the universal ability to read and write would result in a full-employment economy of book publishing.

It’s actually worse. A single computer program written by perhaps a dozen developers can wipe out hundreds of jobs. Digital companies employ ten times fewer people per dollar earned than traditional companies. Every time a company decides to relegate its computing to the cloud, it is free to release a few more IT employees. Most of the technologies we are currently developing replace or obsolesce far more employment opportunities than they create. Those that don’t—technologies that require ongoing human maintenance or participation to work—are not supported by venture capital for precisely this reason. They are considered unscalable because they require more paid human employees as the business grows.

When technology increases productivity, a company has a new excuse to eliminate jobs and use the savings to reward its shareholders with dividends and stock buybacks. What would have been lost to wages is instead turned back into capital. So the middle class hollows out, and the only ones left making money are those depending on the passive returns from their investments.

No question, digital technology has created tremendous new avenues for growth. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and many other corporations have created new opportunities and new millionaires. But as a result of their extractive, monopolistic practices, the landscape is left with less total activity and potential for growth. The pie is smaller, or at best staying the same, but these digital businesses have managed to get bigger pieces of it—making it harder for every other corporation around, including themselves in the long term.

In large part, this is because they’re still operating as if they were twentieth-century industrial corporations—only the original corporate code is now being executed by entirely more powerful and rapidly acting digital business plans. What algorithms do to the trading floor, digital business does to the economy. In the purely rational light of the computer program, a digital corporation is optimized to convert cash into share price—money and value into pure capital. Most of the people enabling this have no reason to believe it is harmful to the business landscape, much less to human beings

Amazon retrieves the spirit of empire by colonizing not just verticals within its own category but horizontals in everyone else’s. It first established a platform monopoly in books by selling books at a loss, in the manner of Walmart using its ample war chest of capital to undercut local stores. A simple loyalty perk like free shipping was eventually revealed to be the ever-expanding, increasingly sticky Amazon Prime. Amazon then leveraged its monopoly in books and free shipping to develop monopolies in other verticals, beginning with home electronics (bankrupting Circuit City and Best Buy), and then every other link in the physical and virtual fulfillment chain, from shoes and food to music and videos.

[...]

Amazon isn’t really a new sort of company so much as a very old sort of company. It is leveraging digital platforms the way colonial powers once leveraged their exclusive shipping routes to the New World. (Both even have pirates to watch out for!) That’s why none of this is ever about bringing more value to people or—heaven forbid—helping people create and exchange value on their own. Digitizing the corporation simply affords it ever more efficient and compelling ways to extract what remaining value people and places have to offer.

As corporate law is currently structured, CEOs and their boards of directors can be held liable if they fail to do everything in their power to maximize quarterly returns for public shareholders. CEOs are not merely incentivized to pursue the short-term bottom line; they are legally obligated. Rather than liberating the corporation from such ultimately counterproductive rules, the digital age has put them on automatic, exacerbating their impact and making them appear more permanently embedded than ever. The more promising potential of the digital environment would be to revise the corporation itself to our liking. That’s the invitation here—not to digitize the corporation with technology but to approach the corporation itself from a digital perspective of redesign. The corporation’s charter can be recoded.

[...] speculators saw in digital technology a gateway to a new, virtual form of colonialism: a new place to lend and deploy capital, new territory for growth.

Alas, the big data profiles of teenagers can’t support the same robustness of growth as entire continents of slaves and spices. Besides, consumer research is all about winning some portion of a fixed number of purchases. It doesn’t create more consumption. If anything, technological solutions tend to make markets smaller and less likely to spawn associated industries in shipping, resource management, and labor services. They make the differential between real growth and return on capital worse, not better. This means they push the banks and investors even further away from anything like real earnings until eventually there’s a complete disconnect between capital and value.

At one well-meaning Southern California fitness app startup I visited regularly, the young founders held weekly meetings at which the chief technology officer would educate his engineers on different aspects of the development process. But as time went on, he grew less likely to lecture on programming biofeedback interfaces than on business strategy. It was as if he had cracked a new sort of code. He spoke of scalable solutions, long-term contracts, and high switching costs—steps they could take to ensure “defensible outcomes” and achieve a “platform monopoly.

He had fully accepted the startup playbook’s emphasis on massive growth above all else and was now turning his tremendous capacity for programming toward that singular, highly limited ambition. The product was less important now than the prize. He and his partner were not in a position to entertain a true disruption of the marketplace, anyway. They had won one of those pitch-your-idea contests by coming up with an idea literally overnight. The venture capital flowed in days later, and these kids were—like so many other young entrepreneurs who accept tens of millions of dollars up front—obligated to build a company worth a billion dollars.

The most ambitious commons-inspired project to date, the Ecuadoran government’s “Free, Libre, Open Knowledge” program, or FLOK, seeks to transform the entire nation from its current extractive, oil-based economy to one based on a protected commons of both real and digital resources. Under these policies (still in development), intellectual property would be considered part of the commons. This would lead to the creation of hyperlocal factories, schools, and labs, freed from the constraints of licensing fees. So the thinking goes, this would then allow companies to operate with greater fairness, efficiency, and sustainability. The FLOK project originates with a specific set of Latin-American socioeconomic concerns. Foremost among these is “biopiracy,” the practice of industrial agricultural companies such as Monsanto, which patent organic technology developed over centuries by local and indigenous farmers. Here in the United States, we can find an analogue in the practice of tech giants such as Apple or Google, that rely on the open-source commons for many of their products’ architectures, profiting without paying back into the digital commons. In response to these challenges, FLOK proposes the development of peer-production licenses under which only commoners, cooperatives, and nonprofits would enjoy free usage of intellectual property bounded by the commons; corporations would have to pay.

At first glance, the so-called “sharing economy” appears to be based in these commons principles. At least in some superficial way, this is true. We have gone from buying music on records or CDs to downloading MP3 files to simply subscribing to Pandora or Spotify. Owning music—or a car, for that matter—is becoming less important than having access to it. This is certainly a step on the path from hoarding to sharing. Except the many sharing platforms and services are not sharing at all but renting. We don’t collectively own the vehicles of Zipcar any more than we collectively own Spotify’s catalogue of music. And as private companies induce us to become sharers, we contribute our own cars, creativity, and couches to a sharing economy that is more extractive than it is circulatory. Our investments of time, place, and materials are exploited by those who have invested money and actually own the platforms.

Now that we can see it, however, we can also envision the alternative: we join and form businesses that value our real investments of effort, stuff, and community resources. Imagine an Amazon owned by the sellers, an Uber owned by the drivers, or a Facebook owned by the people whose data and attention is being bought and sold. Distributed digital technology makes this not only possible but preferable to the locked-down, overprogrammed, and extractive platform monopolies of today. [...]

[...] It would however be idealistic to limit the notion of digital labour to the exploitation of users’ online activities by commercial platforms that use targeted advertising or to the creation of digital content that is sold as a commodity. The creation of digital content requires a technological infrastructure that is produced and maintained by labour processes (Fuchs, 2014, 2015). Digital labour is all paid and unpaid labour that helps creating digital technologies, content, and data that is sold as a commodity. It includes diverse activities such as slave-labour extracting minerals that form the physical foundation of information technologies, the labour of militarily controlled and highly exploited hardware assemblers who work under conditions of Taylorist industrialism, a highly paid knowledge labour aristocracy, precarious digital service workers as well as imperialistically exploited knowledge workers in developing countries, workers conducting the industrial recycling and management of e-waste, or highly hazardous informal physical e-waste labour (Fuchs, 2014, 2015). Such forms of digital labour form an international division of digital labour that creates the digital media industry’s profits (ibid.). Why is it important to have such a unified concept of digital labour? Nick Dyer-Witheford (2014, 175) provides an answer: ‘To name the global worker is to make a map; and a map is also a weapon’. So what Nick Dyer-Witheford points out is the political relevance of a critical theory of digital media: it names and analyses the problem and can thereby point citizens, classes and social groups towards what is wrong and what contradictions they face.

[...] Financialisation is a response to contradictions of capitalism that result in capitalists’ attempts to achieve spatial (global outsourcing) and temporal (financialisation) fixes to problems associated with overaccumulation, overproduction, underconsumption, falling profit rates, profit squeezes, and class struggles (Harvey 2003, 89; Harvey 2005, 115). The ideological hype of the emergence of a ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘social media’ that communicated the existence of a radially new Internet was primarily aimed at restoring confidence of venture capital to invest in the Internet economy. The rise of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and related tar- geted advertising-based platforms created a new round of financialisation of the Internet economy with its own objective contradiction: in a situation of global capitalist crisis corporate social media attract advertising investments because companies think targeted advertising is more secure and efficient than conventional advertising (Fuchs 2014c). Financial investors share these hopes and believe in social media’s growing profits and dividends, which spurs their investments of financial capital in social media corporations. The clickthrough-rate (the share of ads that users click on in the total number of pre- sented ads) is however on average just 0.1 per cent (Fuchs 2014c), which means that on average only one out of 1,000 targeted ads yields actual profits. And even in these cases it is uncertain if users will buy commodities on the pages the targeted ads direct them to. [...]

[...] It is however mistaken to see Facebook as a communications company: it does not sell communication or access to communication, but user data and targeted advert space. Facebook is one of the world’s largest advertising agencies.

[...] Corporations such as Amazon.com and Apple do not just exploit one type of digital labour, but different ones: Amazon.com doesn’t just put a rent on freelance services via Mechanical Turk, it also sells physical goods such as the Kindle and paperbacks and intangible goods such as e-books. Apple’s primary income source is the sale of digital technologies such as Apple computers and the iPhone. But Apple also sells content via its iTunes store. Given the global and convergent character of transnational information corporations, it is not feasible to separate the physical and the mental labour conducting for these companies. Digital workers form a collective workforce. The phenomenon of cultural and digital labour shows that culture and the economy are not separate.

The working conditions are as poor as described in the two examples because global information corporations are profitable businesses: Apple’s profits amounted in 2015 to US$53.4 billion 3 . Amazon’s profits were in the same year US$596 million. There is a class antagonism between information labour and information capital. These conditions can only be changed if the information workers of the world unite at the transnational level in order to challenge the power of information capital. [...] The dialectic takes on a very political form in information capitalism so that class relations bring about highly exploited forms of labour. At the same time, many digital media companies have come under criticism for avoiding paying taxes, which not just increases their profits, but also deprives states of tax income and supports austerity measures that destroy the welfare state and threaten social security.

[...] The world of information technology is one that is shaped by a dialectic of repression and emancipatory struggles. Digital media are technologies of domination and liberation at the same time. These potentials are, however, not equally distributed. In a class-based society, we can always take the dominative use of technologies for certain, whereas alternative uses aiming at liberation are much more fragile and precarious. Only political praxis can bring about humanity’s emancipation from repression. A critical theory of communication and society stands in solidarity with those who resist and oppose the corporationalisation, commodification and bureaucratisation of communication and the world.

Platforms beat pipelines because platforms scale more efficiently by eliminating gatekeepers. Until recently, most businesses were built around products, which were designed and made at one end of the pipeline and delivered to consumers at the other end. Today, plenty of pipeline-based businesses still exist—but when platform-based businesses enter the same marketplace, the platforms virtually always win.

One reason is that pipelines rely on inefficient gatekeepers to manage the flow of value from the producer to the consumer. In the traditional publishing industry, editors select a few books and authors from among the thousands offered to them and hope the ones they choose will prove to be popular. It’s a time-consuming, labor-intensive process based mainly on instinct and guesswork. By contrast, Amazon’s Kindle platform allows anyone to publish a book, relying on real-time consumer feedback to determine which books will succeed and which will fail. The platform system can grow to scale more rapidly and efficiently because the traditional gatekeepers—editors—are replaced by market signals provided automatically by the entire community of readers.

The elimination of gatekeepers also allows consumers greater freedom to select products that suit their needs. The traditional model of higher education forces students and their parents to purchase one-size-fits-all bundles that include administration, teaching, facilities, research, and much more. In their role as gatekeepers, universities can require families to buy the entire package because it is the only way they can get the valuable certification that a degree offers. However, given the choice, many students would likely be selective in the services they consume. Once there is an alternate certification that employers are willing to accept, universities will find it increasingly challenging to maintain the bundle. Unsurprisingly, developing such an alternate certification is among the primary goals of platform education firms such as Coursera.

[...] How do you convert a product to a platform in the business-to-business (B2B) arena? Many corporations own massive fixed assets like power generation plants, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, or tracts of farmland. How do you build platforms around those?

The answer: you de-link ownership of the physical asset from the value it creates. This allows the use of the asset to be independently traded and applied to its best use—that is, the use that creates the greatest economic value—rather than being restricted to uses specific to the owner. As a result, efficiency and value rise dramatically.

In the complexity of the governance issues they face, today’s biggest platform businesses resemble nation-states. With more than 1.5 billion users, Facebook oversees a “population” larger than China’s. Google handles 64 percent of the online searches in the U.S. and 90 percent of those in Europe, while Alibaba handles more than 1 trillion yuan ($162 billion) worth of transactions a year and accounts for 70 percent of all commercial shipments in China. Platform businesses at this scale control economic systems that are bigger than all but the biggest national economies. No wonder Brad Burnham, one of the lead investors at Union Square Ventures, responded to the introduction of Facebook Credits—a short-lived system of virtual currency for use in playing online games—by wondering what the move said about Facebook’s monetary policy. In a similar vein, we might ask: In choosing to apply unilateral software standards as opposed to multilateral standards (as we saw in chapter 7), what kind of foreign policy is Apple pursuing? Is Twitter following an industrial policy based on investment in “state-owned” services or one relying on decentralized development by others? What does Google’s approach to censorship in China tell us about the company’s human rights policy?

Thus, when a firm can erect barriers to entry, it can keep competitors out, and entrants with substitute products cannot storm the castle. When a firm can subjugate suppliers, competition among them weakens their bargaining power so the firm can keep its costs low. When a firm can subjugate buyers by keeping them relatively small, disunited, and powerless, the firm can keep its prices high.

In this model, the firm maximizes profits by avoiding ruinous competition for itself but encouraging it for everyone else in the value chain. Advantage is found in industry structures that create a protective moat—one that enables the firm to segment markets, differentiate products, control resources, avoid price wars, and defend its profit margins.

[...] But beyond being pro-technology the government has also uncritically accepted much of Silicon Valley's rhetoric of disruptive innovation. It is remarkable that the Bay Area technology industry can continue to see itself as a collection of scrappy non-conformist outsiders while accumulating the greatest collection of private fortunes in the world. [...]

An investigation by Vanessa Houlder of the Financial Times showed that up to a third of the price gap between hotels and Airbnb rentals is due to tax differences, with hotels being subject to business taxes and value-added taxes that almost all Airbnb hosts avoid, while many Airbnb hosts benefit from the Sharing Economy allowance mentioned above. Airbnb also avoids costs such as commercial-level fire and safety protection and accessibility features, which its competitors must pay to install. [...]

The Sharing Economy is a movement: it is a movement for deregulation. Major financial institutions and influential venture capital funds are seizing an opportunity to challenge rules made by democratic city governments around the world, and to reshape cities in their own interests. It’s not about building an alternative to a corporate-driven market economy, it’s about extending the deregulated free market into new areas of our lives. An enthusiasm for “the end of ownership,” the title of one Andreessen Horowitz blog post on the Sharing Economy, is difficult to take seriously when it comes from those who actually own the companies involved. [...]

Before this most recent trial, Uber CFO Brent Callinicos mentioned in a meeting with potential investors that Uber could easily raise rates to between 25% and 30%. Venture capitalist Mike Novogratz asked him a question: “You’ve got happy employees, you’ve got happy customers, you’ve got happy shareholders. The holy triumvirate are all really excited about your company. Why are you going to risk that and push the employees’ salary down 5%?” Callinicos responded “because we can."

Uber has taken advantage of its drivers’ vulnerability by imposing more and more strenuous rules. Drivers must accept 90% of ride requests or they get a notification to “Please improve your acceptance rate if you want to continue to use the Uber platform.”  Drivers claim to have been deactivated for being critical of the company on Twitter.

Sharing Economy reputation systems have become fronts for hierarchical and centralized disciplinary systems, which have nothing to do with notions of “peer-to-peer” reputation, “algorithmic regulation” or regulation with a “lighter touch” through ratings. We trust strangers on Sharing Economy platforms for the same reason we trust hotel employees and restaurant waiters: because they are in precarious jobs where customer complaints can lead to disciplinary action. [...]

Linux is no longer the product of “part-time hacking.” Most of the programmers who work on the project earn a good living for doing so, just as do those who work on proprietary software. The companies that sponsor and contribute to Linux do not do so out of the generosity of their hearts, they do so for solid commercial reasons.

Linux is no longer subversive. It has moved steadily away from being an outsider to taking its place as a comfortable part of the existing commercial world. In a way, if there was a revolution, Linux has won, but it’s an Animal Farm victory. In winning, Linux has become like those it displaced: more professional, more structured, more carefully governed. Linux has not undermined powerful institutions and companies (although it has made some operating systems obsolete); instead, those institutions have learned to live happily with Linux, and even profit from it.

This shrunken workforce will be asked to do more, for lower wages, at a yet higher pace. Amazon is again the leading indicator here. Its warehouse workers are hired on fixed, short-term contracts, through a deniable outsourcing agency, and precluded from raises, benefits, opportunities for advancement or the meaningful prospect of permanent employment. They work under conditions of “rationalized” oversight in the form of performance metrics that are calibrated in real time. Any degree of discretion or autonomy they might have retained is ruthlessly pared away by efficiency algorithm. The point couldn’t be made much more clearly: these facilities are places that no one sane would choose to be if they had any other option at all.

Most of the blue-collar workers that do manage to retain employment will find themselves “below the API”—that is, subject to having their shifts scheduled by optimization algorithm, on little or no notice, for periods potentially incommensurate with their needs for sleep and restoration, their family life, or their other obligations. (In the UK and elsewhere the practice is tolerated, the terms of such employment may be specified by so-called zero-hour contracts, which offer no guaranteed minimum of shifts.) [...]

Other, less central aspects of the visions we’re presented of a world without work might trouble us as well. In his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin fetishizes fully automated logistics, without considering how often logistics workers specifically have constituted the most radical faction of industrial labor. Without for a moment romanticizing the circumstances that gave rise to their militancy, we might want to remember how frequently in the past it’s been workers toiling in the most oppressive industries who have offered themselves as the insurgent brake on unfettered capital accumulation. On our way to a world of total automation, we may often have time to contemplate what a society winds up looking like when its most mutinous voices have fallen silent.

[...] the most substantial rewards are allocated, on an industrial
basis, to those who build and maintain the technologies of
extraction, who hold the system’s intellectual property, and who
can trade the aggregate output of personal expression as if it were some bulk commodity like grain or beets. The real spoils,
in other words, do not go to the aspiring stars, ranked and rated
by the battery of metrics that measure Internet sentiment and
opinion, but to behind-the-scenes content hosts and data miners,
who utilize these and other metrics to guarantee their profits. The
outcome, for this latter group, is a virtually wage-free proposition.
When all is said and done, the informal contract that underpins
this kind of economy is a profoundly asymmetrical deal.

The new kind of distributed labor does not need to be performed
by payroll employees in far-flung branch locations [...] it is done either by users who do not perceive their interactive
input as work at all, or else it is contracted out online—through a
growing number of e-lance service sites—to a multitude of taskers
who piece together lumps of income from motley sources. As in
the offshore outsourcing model, the dispersion of this labor is
highly organized, but it is not dependent on physical relocation
to cheap labor markets. [...]

Many readers will no doubt conclude that this dual utilization is all part of some big-picture trade-off. After all, the social web has opened up a whole new universe of information-rich public goods—including the potential for anticapitalist organizing; really, really free markets; peer-to-peer common value creation; public access culture; cyberprotest; and alternative economies of all sorts [...] On balance, then, it could be said that the role social web platforms are playing in new modes of capital accumulation is simply the price one pays for maintaining nonproprietary networks whose scope of activity is large and heterogeneous enough to escape the orbit of government or corporate surveillance. Though the enclosers are pushing hard, the balance, for the time being, is still in favor of the commons. From this point of view, all of the free labor that gets skimmed off can be seen as a kind of tithe we pay to the Internet as a whole so that the expropriators stay away from the parts of it we really cherish.

The labor infractions in these old media sectors are conspicuous
because they take place against the still heavily unionized
backdrop of the entertainment industries. In the world of new
media, where unions have no foothold whatsoever, the blurring
of the lines between work and leisure and the widespread
exploitation of amateur or user input has been normative from the
outset. It would be more accurate to conclude, then, that while
digital technology did not give birth to the model of free labor, it
has proven to be a highly efficient enabler of nonstandard work
arrangements.

On the question of the general intellect, there is little dispute that some high-growth industrial sectors are increasingly dependent on ideas and creative talent, and that capital has had to grant some concessions in order to guarantee a supply of cognitive skills. As long as their control over intellectual property is assured, capital owners have been willing to cede some ground over labor discipline; the creative work landscape now hosts multiple forms of autonomy and self-organization, at a far remove from the Taylorist rules of standardization and deskilling. Yet the copy-fight over intellectual property is a fraught terrain, featuring running skirmishes with the commons-loving hacker fractions of the cognitive class over the policing of digital rights management. So, too, the exposure of capital to open knowledge networks for sources of profit carries its own risks; investments in technically specific business models can go south rapidly when access to the same knowledge is widely available at no cost. In the case of free inputs, the hand that gives is also the hand that takes.

[...]

It would be naive, however, to conclude, as some advocates of immaterial labor do, that capital has been weakened or outsmarted by the need to forage far and wide, and on especially uncertain and hostile terrain, for cognitive inputs and surpluses. The evidence from the current rent-extraction boom is that profits from new markets are far from soft, whether for jumbo monopolists like Google and Facebook or rapidly expanding content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content or for the army of smaller content aggregators. Moreover, their business models are highly quantitative and are very precisely tied to the measurable value of inputs from users or contributors. In this regard, it is by no means clear that the increasingly sophisticated Internet metrics industry represents a significant departure from the gainful calculus of the labor theory of value. Far from transforming the conventions of worker productivity and rewards beyond recognition, the digital labor system, as Chris Lehman suggests, has “merely sent the rewards further down the fee stream to unscrupulous collectors.”

[...] Because its profit margin from making components was much larger than the margins it enjoyed from computer assembly, Foxconn was able to take them on by integrating all the parts manufacture and lowering its own margin on the final assembly work. Now that it is the largest private employer in China, with more than one million workers, Foxconn has the market power to force these former customers to adopt its vertical production methods by merging with its other component suppliers. [...]

In Richard Barbrook’s definition, the digital economy is characterized by the emergence of new technologies (computer networks) and new types of workers (the digital artisans). According to Barbrook, the digital economy is a mixed economy: it includes a public element (the state’s funding of the original research that produced ARPANET, the financial support to academic activities that had a substantial role in shaping the culture of the Internet); a market-driven element (a latecomer that tries to appropriate the digital economy by reintroducing commodification); and a gift economy element (the true expression of the cutting edge of capitalist production that prepares its eventual overcoming into a future “anarchocommunism”).

The outcome of the explicit interface between capital and the
Internet is a digital economy that manifests all the signs of an
acceleration of the capitalist logic of production. It might be
that the Internet has not stabilized yet, but it seems undeniable
that the digital economy is the fastest and most visible zone of
production within late capitalist societies. [...]

Such reliance, almost a dependency, is part of larger mechanisms of capitalist extraction of value that are fundamental to late capitalism as a whole. That is, such processes are not created outside capital and then reappropriated by capital, but are the results of a complex history where the relation between labor and capital is mutually constitutive, entangled, and crucially forged during the crisis of Fordism. Free labor is a desire of labor immanent to late capitalism, and late capitalism is the field that both sustains free labor and exhausts it. It exhausts it by subtracting selectively but widely the means through which that labor can reproduce itself: from the burnout syndromes of Internet start-ups to underretribution and exploitation in the cultural economy at large. Late capitalism does not appropriate anything: it nurtures, exploits, and exhausts its labor force and its cultural and affective production. In this sense, it is technically impossible to separate neatly the digital economy of the net from the larger network economy of late capitalism. Especially since 1994, the Internet has been always and simultaneously a gift economy and an advanced capitalist economy. The mistake of the neoliberalists (as exemplified by the Wired group), is to mistake this coexistence for a benign, unproblematic equivalence.

Vectoral power can thus dispense with much of the machinery of the old capitalist ruling class. It is a matter of indifference who actually owns a furnace or an assembly line. The vectoral class contracts out such functions. The rise of the manufacturing industry in China and of the service industry in India is not the sign, then, that these underdeveloped states are joining the capitalist developed world. Rather, they now confront an overdeveloped world ruled by vectoral power.

It’s a question of pushing the often local or issue-based approach to hacker class consciousness into an entire worldview, or rather, worldviews. The challenge is to think the whole social totality from our point of view—to imagine worlds in which our own interests and the interests of the people are aligned. The way to do this, I think, is to push beyond the compromise formations of things like creative commons. What would it mean not to liberalize intellectual property but to conceive of the world without it altogether? What would it mean to really think and practice the politics of information as something that is not scarce and has no owners?

According to Ong, labor arbitrage is one of the strategies that informs the conditions of governing and disciplining by way of deterritorializing labor. Labor arbitrage breaks apart the traditional relationship between the national labor legislations and the worker as citizen. Ong describes labor arbitrage as “the latest technique to exploit time-space coordinates in order to accumulate profits, putting into play a new kind of flexibility” (Ong 2006: 174). Cognitive labor is particularly susceptible to labor arbitrage technologies because computerized division of labor enables the fragmentation of tasks into smaller and standardizable units, allowing their completion by an assembly of workers across the globe (Ong 2006: 161). I believe crowdsourcing is an apparatus of a neoliberal system of exception that signifies a novel instance of labor arbitrage, where online cognitive labor markets are established as aggregation platforms that simultaneously act as a techno-immigration system.

AMT divides cognitive tasks into discrete pieces so that the completion of tasks is not dependent on the cooperation of the workers themselves but is organized from outside by information and communication technologies industries. By the elimination of the cooperation aspect of the cognitive work, the labor power becomes a variable capital as it creates value only after the activation and organization of the capital.

As a result of the fragmentation of cognitive tasks, crowdsourced workers not only produce the desired information for the task algorithm, but they are, in turn, produced by the algorithm, disciplined by its process flows into a particular cognitive mode and problem solving that eventually determines the efficiency of their labor and thus their livelihood. [...]

[...] Much of the discussion of online tracking has focused on the fate of privacy and the rights that pertain to it. This is an important set of issues, but it is complicated by the way in which it frames privacy in terms of personal choice (thereby dismissing challenges to the choices made by consumers as patronizing at best and at worst an affront to their personal freedom) and overlooks the way in which their information has become the private property of the commercial entities that do the work of harvesting it. It also tends to invoke the counterargument that there is little need for concern since many forms of monitoring that take place in interactive contexts are anonymous in the sense that the aggregators and their clients are not particularly interested in the personal identity of those monitored and do not personally inspect the details of their profiles (as if somehow the fact that no one is reading our personal e-mails means that there should be no cause for concern that they are being electronically scanned to determined how best to manipulate us). Privacy, in short, has a tendency to frame the discussion in personal, individual terms.

For Ritzer and Jurgensen (2010), the capture of value online represents the extension of the logic of capital into new spaces and temporalities: “it appears that capitalists have found another group of people—beyond workers (producers)—to exploit and a new source of surplus value. In this case, capitalism has merely done what it has always done—found yet another way to expand.” [...]

[...] The privatization and commercialization of the Internet is a form of material deprivation and enclosure insofar as it separates users from the infrastructure that supports their communicative activities. It reinforces and reproduces the structure of social relations wherein a small group controls the productive resources used by the many and allows economic advantages to accrue from this control. The ownership class that includes the founders of Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and so on could not exist without capturing and controlling components of the productive infrastructure. The value that they appropriate stems in large part from their ability to capture aspects of the activity of those who access their resources, and their ability to do so is directly related to their ownership and control of these resources. Bluntly put, the ability to exploit this activity for commercial purposes for the economic benefit of the few would disappear if these resources were commonly owned and controlled.

[...] the privatization and commercialization of much of the digital media infrastructure does not take place by force, but merely reproduces existing property relations by extending them into the digital realm. The background of compulsion is built into the legal structure and regulatory regimes that enable the privatization process. [...]

Privacy-based critiques do not quite capture the element of productive power and control at work in the promise of monitoring-based marketing. If privacy violations constitute an invasion—a loss of control over the process of self-disclosure— market monitoring includes an additional element of control and management: the systematic use of personal information to predict and influence. The critique of exploitation addresses this element of power and control. Defenders of market monitoring will argue that individual consumer behavior remains uncoerced. Critical approaches, however, locate coercion not solely at the level of discrete individual decisions, but also in the social relations that structure them. In this regard, the invocation of the notion of exploitation parallels Jonathan Beller’s claim in his contribution to this volume that, “an interest in labor should force us to rethink the logistics of media platforms and see them as technologies formed in the struggle between labor and capital and thus by and for the expropriation of labor.”

[...] A valuable asset of so-called sharing-economy businesses like Uber or AirBnB is typically their network of committed suppliers--Uber's drivers or AirBnB's hosts. This too is an asset of lasting value that both companies have invested heavily to develop (and which they invest to protect, for example, against legal actions requiring them to treat their suppliers as employees).

[...] Google, Microsoft and Facebook need relatively few tangible assets compared to the manufacturing giants of yesteryear. They can scale their intangible-asset bundle or software and reputation and so get very big. This type of scalability is, of course, enhanced by network effects.

This intensifies what policymakers call "tax competition": the idea that businesses and owners of capital will shop around for the most favorable tax policies. This makes it harder for governments to increase taxes and exacerbates the problem that led to lower taxes on capital in the first place.

[...] because it is unusually internationally mobile, intangibles increase tax competition, which makes it harder for governments to reduce inequality by taxing capital more.

A third aspect of finance is the perception that venture capital will be very important for the economies of the future. It is hard to think of a major developed country whose government has not spent taxpayers' money in an attempt to build or grow its VC sector. Most developed countries have put in place coinvestment schemes or tax breaks to try and stimulate a venture capital sector like that of the United States.

The exercise of authority seems like a good description of the Amazon warehouse above. A lot of careful process engineering has combined to allow a system where the optimal route around the warehouse can be computed very efficiently. As the economist Luis Garicano has pointed out (2000), enhancements in information technology have improved the flow of information around the organization. A fall in the price of information might lead to less authority: the breakdown of hierarchies, with autonomous workers e-mailing ideas up tot he boss. However, monitoring has also become more efficient with the growth of IT, so, in the Amazon case, IT has reinforced a "command and control" type of organizational design.

Thus part of the reason for the perhaps unexpected growth in this type of very nonautonomous work is that the intangibles of organizational development and software enable more and more effective monitoring. Thus they are substitutes for autonomy. [...] Marxist economists have a name for this additional monitoring role: "power-biased technological change"

[...] Establishing these kinds of exchanges is a major undertaking, requiring significant coordination between rights-holders, content platforms, collection agencies, and governments. But it may be worth the effort: efficient markets and platforms for exchanging IP will be economically valuable in an intangible economy.

[...] 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). [...]

[...] 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 [...]

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" [...]

[...] the workplace where people got paid was transformed ideologically. People learned there that work under monopoly capitalism involves competition between individuals whose possessive needs necessarily set them in conflict with each other rather than with the owners of the means of their (concealed) cooperative production. The carrot which systematically motivated them was the pursuit of commodities [...]

[...] instrumental problems that required solutions in order to facilitate transactions between advertisers and broadcasters. The most obvious was to demonstrate the existence of an audience. In economic terms, this meant some measure of productivity. But besides adequate numbers of listeners, a measure was needed to demonstrate that the right product was being produced that the audience for which advertisers expressed a demand was in fact being delivered by broadcasters. Only after agreeing on a basic method for producing measures of productivity and quality could broadcasters and advertisers move to the real business at hand--the buying and selling of audiences according to a rational price structure.

Inherent in the situation, then, is both continuity and discontinuity in the interests of the advertising and broadcasting industries. While continuity rests in the need for an official description of the audience, discontinuity arises from the connection between that description and pricing. [...] neither industry could trust the other to measure productivity and quality, yet both needed some measure in order to transact sales. In this way, despite unified demand for measures of productivity and quality, the situation presented contradictory interests and thereby the possibility for independence for any ratings producer that could successfully manipulate those differences. [...]

Let's begin with the advertising-supported commercial media as part of the whole economy. How do they make a profit? A short answer would be that the media speed up the selling of commodities, their circulation from production to consumption. Hence, they speed the realization of value (the conversion of value into a money form) embodied in commodities produced everywhere in the economy. Through advertising, the rapid consumption of commodities cuts down on circulation and storage costs for industrial capital. Media capital (e.g., broadcasters) receives a portion of surplus value (profits) of industrial capital as a kind of rent paid for access to audiences. The differences between this rent and its costs of production (e.g., wages paid to media industry workers) constitute its profit.

[...] there is much wasted watching by irrelevant viewers. Specification and fractionation of the audience leads to a form of concentrated viewing by the audience in which there is (from the point of view of advertisers) little wasted watching. Because that advertising time can be sold at a higher ate by the media, we can say that the audience organized in this manner watches harder and with more intensity and efficiency. In fact, because the value of the time goes up, necessary watching-time decreases, and surplus watching-time increases, thus leading to relative surplus value.

The other major way in which relative surplus value operates in the media is through the division of time. [...]

[...] the early history of industrial capitalism is tied up with attempts by capital to extend the time of the working day in an absolute sense, thus manipulating the ratio between necessary time and surplus time. [...]

However, as Marx realized, this absolute extension of the working day cannot go on indefinitely. Unions and collective bargaining limited the length of the working day, forcing capital to increase the intensity of labor. The concept of relative surplus value initially meant the cheapening of consumer goods that reproduce labor-power, so that the amount of necessary time would be decreased. [...]

[...] Despite the fact that huge amounts of money (much more than programming) are spent on producing attractive commercials, people do all they can to avoid them. [...]

These findings have not been lost on the advertising or television industries, who have increasingly recognized that the traditional concept of a ratings point may no longer be valid. Ratings measure program watching rather than commercial watching. Indeed, it seems that there is much disparity between the two, and advertisers are starting to voice their discontent at having to pay for viewers who may not be watching their ads at all. [...]

Up until now, we have made a rather strict distinction between programming and advertising. In the historical development of the commercial media system, however, the boundaries between the two were very often blurred. The function of programming is much more than merely capturing the watching activity of a specific demographic group of the market. Programming also has to provide the right environment for the advertising that will be inserted within it. Advertisers seek compatible programming vehicles that stress the lifestyles of consumption. [...] At a more explicit level, advertisers sought to have their products placed within the program itself. In all of these ways, we can see a blurring between the message content of the commercials and the message content of the programming.

We purposely describe these practices as surveillance, as this highlights the focused and sustained collection of personal information (Lyon 2001). Our discussions are also intended to further the conception that the use of social media constitutes a form of participatory (Albrechstlund 2008) or collaborative (Pridmore 2013) surveillance. Of course this connects with what has been described as a political economy of personal information (Gandy 1993; cf. Gandy 2009) or the personal information economy (Elmer 2004; Pridmore 2013). In addition, the use of social media for marketing purposes can also be seen as aligned with the study of audience labor (Smythe 1981) and political economic concerns in the age of new media (Dyer-Witheford 1999).

The political economic approach to communication conceptualizes technology as a commodity produced by corporations. The goal of corporations is to maximize profit. Political economist study the process of capital accumulation and examine the evolution and renewal of capitalism. [...]

[...] Both stories seem to reinforce that Brin and Page, like many America inventors, deserve their great fortune because they have something useful and unique to offer. In popular thinking, because of the raw talent and grand vision of these inventors, their companies should not be criticized. Instead, their inventions should be viewed as technology that positively impacts society, and as knowledge that leads humankind one step away from darkness. [...]

[...] By rewarding advertisers who can successfully predict the keywords that users type in and by punishing those who cannot, Google hopes that AdWords can be relevant and useful to online search.

Nevertheless, AdWords is only profitable because it is a vertically integrated system in which Google controls every step of the process by providing search results to users, by selling "keywords" to advertisers, and by providing statistics to marketers. [...]

Despite Google's claims, a vertically integrated advertising system may not be that objective because it is difficult to determine what the exchange value of keywords is. [...] Internet search creates unlimited time because millions of searches take place at any given moment even though only a small number of users see the same ads. In addition, keywords are not exclusive; a number of advertisers can bid for the same keywords. Because of the non-exclusivity and non-scarcity of keywords, their exchange value should be very low, if not close to zero. This is clearly not the case for Google ads [...]

The concept of the audience commodity is crucial to understanding why Google is able to charge advertisers for keywords even though they are neither exhaustive nor exclusive. [...] the exchange value of the audience commodity is imaginary.

Since 2009, a number of critical studies of Google have been published. The focus tends to be more on prosumers and on the free labor performed by Google users rather than on the advertising system and the audience commodity. Here I argue that the key to the political economy of Google as a search engine is not the free labor performed by the prosumers, but how the advertising system works. [...]

[...]

Other studies that also discuss the political economy of Google include Kang and McAllister (2011) and Pasquinelli (2009b) [...] suggests that the political economy of Google is the political economy of PageRank. Value accumulation comes from the economies of attetion--which depends on the attention capital of the whole network--and of cognition--which depends on Google being a "rentier" of the Internet. To Caraway (2011), "the media owner rents the use of the medium to the industrial capitalist who is interested in gaining access to an audience" (701). Pasquinelli (2009b) has overlooked that technology only increases productivity, but it does not create surplus value. Fuchs (2012b) has effectively shown that it is erroneous to assume that PageRank produces profits. [...]

Scholars are often so blinded by the "newness" of technology-enabled media that even critical scholars have lost sight in situating the apparently new phenomenon in the continuity and transformation of capitalism. A Marxist approach is necessarily historical materialist. Therefore political economists aim to "[examine] the dynamic forces in capitalism responsible for its growth and change. The object is to identify both cyclical patterns of short-term expansion and contraction as well as long-term transformation patterns that signal fundamental change in the system" (Mosco 2009, 26). Political economists ought to examine the inherent contradictions in capitalism and how capitalism evolves and renews even though--or especially because--it is not a sustainable political economic system. It is thus imperative to examine how corporations seek new capital once they encounter an over-accumulation of capital.

[...] what is new is the relation between productive and finance capital. The financial performance of Google (or any public company) is closely watched by institutional investors. Google, once a darling of a stock market, is now seen as an underperforming company [...] whom Google should please--it is not the users, not the content producers, not even the advertisers, but the investors. [...] The excessive power that investment banks have over public companies may be something new to the trajectory of capitalism, something that occurred since the 1990s in the centuries-long history of capitalism. [...]

Recall the "cute" story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin being handed a $100,000 USD check by a Silicon Valley venture capitalist (who is a German native emigrated to the U.S. after Stanford). This story would not happen just anywhere in the world. This story represents an outcome of the academic-military-industrial complex, which reinforces U.S. domination and political economic advantage. Smythe (1973/1994, 238) said that "there is no socialist road to western capitalist technological development." [...]

[...] The work that audiences do, according to Smythe, "is to learn to buy particular 'brands' of consumer demands, and to spend their income accordingly. In short, they work to create demand for advertised goods" (1977, 6). The fact that not all viewers see the ads or respond in anticipated fashion is taken into consideration by Smythe's argument, which considers the overall transformations associated with the rise of consumer society at the aggregate rather than the individual level. Whether or not a particular user responds in a particular way is largely immaterial with respect to the substance of his claims--not last because this diversity is also factored into marketing calculations. What matters is that the rise of a consumer society would have been impossible without a pervasive and powerful advertising industry. As Smythe's analysis in Dependency Road suggests, viewers of advertising "work" at becoming trained consumers--at embracing a consumer-oriented lifestyle, the values that go along with it, and the vocabulary of images and associations upon which it builds. The media industries are not the sole participants in the creation of the audience commodity and its productivity from the perspective of capitalism; they are assisted in this endeavour by the range of social institutions that produce and reproduce consumption-driven lifestyles, including the school system, family, and peer groups.

It is precisely because these companies are not content providers themselves that they can be portrayed as post-ideological. Smythe's critique remains germane because it enjoins us to consider the production regimes that structure the relations between the affordances of the platform or application and the process whereby free access is valorized. The importance of such an approach is that it further invites us to think through the relations between the reliance on advertising, the collection of personal information, and the customization of the information environment: to see these as dialectically linked in an economically productive fashion. Google does not produce goods or services for sale in a conventional sense (it even offloads the creation of the ads it serves onto ad purchases)--the only product it produces for sale is the audience for its various advertising products. [...]

The fetishization of content underwrites the fantasy that it is somehow detachable from the infrastructure that supports it. The thrust of Smythe's argument is to dismantle this fantasy, a task which remains a pressing one on the digital era in which, we are told, everyone (or at least a lot more people than before) can create their own content--but not, significantly the structures for organizing, sorting, and retrieving it. We can make our own Web page, but not our own Google; we can craft our own Tweets, but not our own Twitter (at least not without a fair amount of expertise and venture capital). By focusing on practices seemingly associated with the superstructural realm of cultural consumption, Smythe nonetheless reminds us of the importance of control and ownership over productive resources, including the means of information sharing, organization, and retrieval. Even in the digital era, matter still matters--especially the expensive kind, such as network infrastructure, data storage facilities and processing power.

[...] Borrowing John Durham Peters' (2009) formulation, we might describe the success of new media companies like Twitter, Google and Amazon.com in terms of the rise of "logistical media." In historical terms, such media include those seemingly content-free media that organize time and space [...] Against the background of the proliferation of data and information, the organizational function becomes increasingly challenging, resource-intensive, and indispensable. As Peters puts it, Google's "power owes precisely to its ability to colonize our desktops, indexes, calendars, maps, correspondence, attention, and habits" (2009, 8). In the digital era, the power of data mining lies further in the ability of the algorithm to organize decision making processes based on information provided by others. The scarcity lies not in the information itself, but in the ability to put it to use in new and powerful ways. [...]

[...] the personal data economy, as a site for capital investment and accumulation, amplifies myths about the emancipatory and/or empowering nature of digital prosumption (e.g., Google, Facebook, and Apple).

[...] 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.) [...]

[...] 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.

[...] In 2012, new start-ups were flush with money and the tech sphere was overwhelmed by ardent media coverage; the verb disrupt was elbowing its way into vernacular prominence and had not yet become a cliché. Facebook’s IPO was not only record-setting but a flag in the ground, and the West Coast seemed a hopeful counternarrative in an otherwise flailing economy. Stories about Silicon Valley were imbued with a certain awe that, today, is starting to fade.

Since the genre’s takeoff in the late 1990s, during the first dot-com boom, writing about the tech industry has traditionally fallen into a few limited camps: buzzy and breathless blog posts pegged to product announcements, suspiciously redolent of press releases; technophobic and scolding accounts heralding the downfall of society via smartphone; dry business reporting; and lifestyle coverage zeroing in on the trappings, trends, and celebrities of the tech scene. In different ways, each neglects to examine the industry’s cultural clout and political economy. This tendency is shifting, as the line between “tech company” and “regular company” continues to blur (even Walmart has an innovation lab in the Bay Area). Founders and their publicists would have you believe that this is a world of pioneers and utopians, cowboy coders and hero programmers. But as tech becomes more pervasive, coverage that unquestioningly echoes the mythologizing impulse is falling out of fashion.

When Google makes money, Stanford makes money. Like most research universities, it holds patents for inventions conceived on campus; the university has brought in more than $300 million in royalties from Google’s PageRank tool, which Larry Page and Sergey Brin patented at the engineering school in 1996. Down the street at the business school, change lives posters hang from lampposts outside buildings named for prominent hedge-fund managers and finance executives. Stanford would seem to have a financial incentive to encourage students to join the biggest tech companies, investment banks, and management consulting firms. A Stanford spokesman said via email, “We want our alumni to find satisfaction and success—however they may define that—regardless of the path they choose when they graduate."

As graduation approached, Niu and her colleagues found themselves gravitating toward for-profit companies. [...] At Microsoft, Chopra is focused on using technology to address poverty. Murata told me, “If we can get people at big tech companies—including within branches that are not social-good-related—to become more thoughtful about how their work impacts society, then that’s a tremendous net-positive impact for the industry.” And it’s hard to fault students for prioritizing lucrative career paths, especially given the fact that the median monthly rent in the Bay Area is over $1,500.

[...] Ultimately, she hopes to use her technical expertise to solve a social problem. For now, she’ll make a living.

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.

[...] that the use of ad-blocking software grew 41 percent last year, with 198 million active users worldwide, according to a study conducted by Adobe and PageFair. This represents an existential threat to the $50 billion online advertising industry and has ignited a bitter feud between advertisers and developers of ad-blocking apps. On the sidelines, privacy advocates are pumping their fists for consumer choice while web publishers wring their hands over lost revenue.

Moreover, when Apple made ad blockers available in its App Store last fall, they quickly became among the most downloaded apps. And later this year, Microsoft is reportedly going to allow an extension to its Edge browser that supports the most popular blocker, Adblock Plus. Read what you will into the fact that Apple and Microsoft’s business models aren’t overly reliant on advertising, unlike their rivals Google and Facebook.

A potential fix would be to allocate the taxable profits made by multinationals proportionally to the amount of sales they make in each country.

Say Google’s parent company Alphabet makes $100 billion in profits globally, and 50 percent of its sales in the United States (a relatively similar scenario to the first quarter of this year, in which that figure was 48 percent). In that case, $50 billion would be taxable in the United States, irrespective of where Google’s intangible assets are or where its workers are employed. A system similar to this already governs state corporate taxes in America.

Under this arrangement, which as far as we know is still in place, it is Google Ireland Limited that actually licenses the tech of Google’s main business to all the Google affiliates in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. (Google has a similar offshoot in Singapore that covers business in Asia).

[...]

See where this is going? In 2015, $15.5 billion in profits made their way to Google Ireland Holdings in Bermuda even though Google employs only a handful of people there. It’s as if each inhabitant of the island nation had made the company $240,000.

In doing this, Google didn’t break the law. Corporations like Google are simply shifting profits to places where corporate taxes are low. It’s not just Internet companies with valuable intellectual property that do this. A car manufacturer, for instance, might shift profits by manipulating export and import prices – exporting car components from America to Ireland at artificially low prices, and importing them back at prices that are artificially high.

Unsurprisingly, O’Reilly believes that tech firms, particularly those led by people he knows personally, are in the best position to push society forward. [...]

[...] His comment is, independent contractors are what makes the wheels on the Uber go ‘round, so it’s fine. He rips into big retail companies later for using tricky scheduling algorithms to keep workers on benefits-less part-time status and goes after Walmart for relying on the welfare system to subsidize its poverty level wages. He doesn’t realize that these companies originated the playbook Uber adapted: selling a model of precarious labor based on on-demand piece-work, masked with the prestige of being a “flexible independent contractor.”

Google and its parent company, Alphabet, which dominates the market for online ads and made an estimated $79 billion from them in 2016, has taken a largely hands-off approach to the potentially existential threat of ad blockers. And, according to recent reports, it now plans to include “ad-filtering” software pre-installed in Chrome—an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach to making the web less annoying.

But AdNauseum isn’t like the other ad blockers: It takes a more activist approach. Rather than just concealing them, the app sends noise into the system by automatically clicking on ads in the background, muddling efforts by advertisers and ad networks like Google’s to determine your preferences and your identity as you browse the web. [...]

[...]

Instead, the team suspected a simpler motive behind Google’s decision: AdNauseum directly conflicts with the way that the company makes most of its money.

Google’s decision to ban AdNauseum was only the latest salvo in an ongoing war over online advertising. The industry and publishers have recently been fighting back against ad blockers, for instance, by requiring visitors to disable them if they want to view a page. In August, Facebook announced it was blocking anti-ad software across its platform. And while AdNauseum is the first desktop ad blocker Google has blocked, it has previously banned mobile apps like anti-tracking tool Disconnect and ad blocker AdBlock Fast from its Android Play Store, citing a rule that says one app can’t interfere with another.

The ad industry also knows that ads can be a nuisance, and it’s taking pre-emptive measures to make them more palatable—or, in Google’s case, to block the unpalatable ones. “We feel like there are a lot of challenges in advertising. There are a lot of wrong ways,” Darin Fisher, vice president of Chrome engineering, told CNet last year. But “if publishers and advertisers do ads the right way, it can be great for the users and for the ecosystem.”

Finally, new monitoring technologies can help firms to shunt workers outside of their legal boundaries through independent contracting, subcontracting, and franchising. Various economic theories suggest that firms tend to bring workers in-house as employees rather than contracting for their services—and therefore tend to accept the legal obligations and financial costs that go along with using employees rather than contractors—when they lack reliable information about workers’ proclivities, or where their work performance is difficult to monitor. In a Coasean approach, the challenge of monitoring workers outside the firm may be a transaction cost that encourages the firm to bring them inside as employees […]

Yet where firms can develop near-perfect knowledge about workers’ performance, the calculus changes.

I see technology as imposing real constraints, and providing meaningful affordances that are sufficiently significant, at least in the short to mid-term, to be a substantial locus of power over the practice of social relations. And yet, technology is neither exogenous nor deterministic, in that it evolves in response to the interaction between the institutional ecosystem and the ideological zeitgeist of a society, such that different societies at the same technological frontier can and do experience significantly different economic and political arrangements. In the short to mid-term, technology acts as a distinct dimension of power enabling some actors to extract more or less than their fair share of economic life; in the long term, technology is a site of struggle, whose shape and pattern are a function of power deployed over the institutional and ideological framework within which we live our lives. The stakes are significant. A left that ignores the implications of technology as a site of meaningful struggle risks falling into a nostalgia for the institutions of yesteryear. But a left that continues to disdain the state and formal institutions, and to imagine that we can build purely technological solutions to inequality risks abandoning the field to the Silicon Valley techno-utopian babble that has legitimated the extractive practices of oligarchy’s most recent heroes.

The most influential economic explanations of rising economic inequality in the past thirty years give a central role to technology, and specifically to the role of skills-biased technical change (SBTC) and the economics of superstars in winner-take-all markets. Both have functioned to naturalize and legitimate emerging patterns of inequality, and to limit the bounds of institutional discussion about the range of feasible interventions that would alleviate inequality while preserving the innovation dynamic on which contemporary rise in standards of living depends. [...]

As David, Amy, and Jed’s manifesto at the launch of this blog captured, the theoretical premise of political economy is that “politics and the economy cannot be separated. Politics both creates and shapes the economy. In turn, politics is profoundly shaped by economic relations and economic power. Attempts to separate the economy from politics make justice harder to pursue in both domains.” The role of a political economy of technology is similarly to develop an institutional-political understanding of technology, and to recognize that arguments that treat technology as exogenous and mediated through pre-political and roughly-efficient markets are descriptively mistaken and normatively stultifying.

This suggests, in my mind, a strategy of worker empowerment and deliberative governance rather than command-and-control regulation. At the firm or workplace level, new forms of unionization and collective bargaining could address the everyday invasions of privacy or erosions of autonomy that arise through technological monitoring. Workers might block new monitoring tools that they feel are unduly intrusive. Or they might accept more extensive monitoring in exchange for greater pay or more reasonable hours.

Workers could also be woven into state and federal policy-making in a more sustained fashion. They could be guaranteed seats on new administrative boards established to consider responses to technological change, for example, or given a formal role in a more robust industrial policy that aims to create high-skill jobs and to train workers to take them on. Such proposals update a classic theme in information law: the potential for new technologies to encourage greater democratization. The twist is that to exert democratic control over contemporary technologies, we may need to repurpose a paradigmatic “old-economy” tool: labor unions.

Today, workers’ wages across the Uber-taxi divide are roughly 65% of what they were in 2010. They are often below the minimum wage. Told through the eyes of workers, the case study of how regulators responded to rule-breaking platforms and created the city’s contemporary Uber economy can neither be explained through innovation fanaticism nor fundamentally through a politics of efficiency and deregulation. Taxi workers understood innovation discourse as obscuring both their everyday hardships and corruptive, though legal, state practices. And they reframed the law in this process as playing an active role in undermining democratic principles, producing the myth of a free market, and exacerbating political and economic inequalities.

This intellectual state of affairs leaves those of us working on technology and inequality with an intellectual challenge. Our closest allies in economics, labor economists who do focus on institutions, leave little room for technology to play any role. Those economists who do pay a lot of attention to technology, tend to treat it as natural and necessary, not itself the product of politics and institutions, and largely as a constraint on the ambition of pursuing an egalitarian economic program.

[...] technology develops as a function of institutional choices; that it is the subject of politics and the site of politics; and that it makes a difference.

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 [...]

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.) [...]

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 [...]

[...] 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.

Perhaps the most polarizing claim from the report is that only 12 percent of all the revenue in the music industry ends up going to artists, a statistic that has been picked up by multiple press outlets.

“SiriusXM is incredibly profitable right now, but instead of sharing the profit with artists, they’re doing everything they can and hiring more lobbyists to pay artists less,” says Erickson, referring to SiriusXM’s recent efforts to combat the Music Modernization Act on Capitol Hill. “The idea that Spotify is going to become more profitable through diversifying its business, and then out of its generosity is going to start paying artists better, is also not consistent with what we’ve seen. We want all of these companies to do well, but ownership consolidation changes the incentives and it’s very difficult for a company not to start exercising that gatekeeper power in way that are disadvantageous to artists.”