by
Lee McGuigan
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
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. [...]
useful to cite on the whole audience labour debate
he describes Fuchs' 2011 pub "A contribution to the political economy of Google
as "a significant contribution to the understanding of Google's capital accumulation process", but (like me) finds his "notion of prosumers providing free labor is problematic"
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. [...]
not sure how much the specific assessments of Wall Street's behaviour hold up now, but the relationship between SV & finance is important and worth drawing out more
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." [...]
literally fire
[...] 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.
about aggregate rather than individuals - FB/Goog publisher stats are reported that way anyway, reinforcing this narrative
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. [...]
framing inspo
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.
connects with Jason's thing about why open source can build git but not github
[...] 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. [...]
I need to actually read JDP at some point
[...] 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).
citing a 2012 WEF report called "Rethinking Personal Data" (saying it's a key economic resource)
nothing really new but possibly worth citing (and the description of it as a "site" is intriguing)
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.