archive/dissertation
Nick Srnicek,
Douglas Rushkoff,
Robert W. McChesney,
Christian Fuchs,
Tim O'Reilly,
Franklin Foer,
McKenzie Wark,
Mark Andrejevic,
Evgeny Morozov,
Wolfgang Streeck
possibly relevant for my dissertation
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.
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. [...]
really digging that he goes into the way these narratives are entwined with real-world effects
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 [...]
"technology could be independently more powerful at structuring social relations than winning political battles or institutional changes that directly regulate those social relations" is a good thing to cite (possibly in reference to techno-utopians)
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.
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. [...]
he cites Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee as subscribing to the second view
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.
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 [...]
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.
something to remember - as much as I push back on the "Facebook users are doing labour" argument, there is something in there which has to be acknowledged
[...] Practically this means that a lot of companies want to advertise on Facebook and calculate social media advertising costs into their commodity prices. [...]