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
[...] 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. [...]
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.
links nicely to that Wendy Brown quote mentioned in Jasmine Chorley's piece about the self being capital to invest in
[...] 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.
his critique of Airbnb is good, his praise of Uber not so much
[...] "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.
quoting someone named Charlie Songhurst, who makes some good points in criticising tech (the tributary metaphor is especially compelling) even if I think he's wrong about pinterest
Ross' response is absolutely awful, though. pension funds? really? notwithstanding my own individual qualms with the current pension system, how on earth is this going to help people who lose their jobs NOW, most of whom won't have bigger pensions as a result? i dont even know where to begin with this. plus he presupposes the necessity of VC firms in general
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.
DISS: supplemental vs survival income
he should really go deeper into the reasons why younger people are less focused on entitlement programs (could it be because ... they don't expect them? because few employers offer decent ones anymore?)
at least he recognises this I guess, though obvs his solution is the most milquetoast & supplicating thing ever
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. [...]
he's falling into the same trap that Evgeny Morozov describes people falling into re: the Internet: thinking of it as this one amorphous thing. instead, we have to treat it as just another tool, and isolate the use cases
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.
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.
doesn't quite pick up on the "platform wars" angle but close
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.
so reactionary tho