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
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
something to cite I guess
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.
I really like the title
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.
a little too corporation-centred for my liking but this is a good view to mention in my diss (in terms of existing proposals)
[...] 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.
big fan of the colonialism metaphor tbh. shoot that shit straight into my veins
I don't agree that it doesn't create more consumption though. Maybe not more overall (perhaps??) but definitely more in certain sectors (useless commodities, experiences, etc)
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.
lolll this is like exactly what I'm saying in Silicon Inquiry
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.
on why IP needs to be part of the commons and the currently model of corporations giving us 'access' to content is not the solution
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. [...]
good idea in theory tho, as always, the devil's in the details ... fb shouldnt just be owned by its users >_>
[...] 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. [...]
this goes a little off the rails, lol, but he is getting at something interesting about how it's the belief in targeted advertising that keeps these companies paying for it (hence propping up its value) even if it's not always possible to attribute. otoh, it does have a measurable effect ... so yeah idk what he's getting at exactly but the link between financialisation and targeted ads is worth pondering