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
[...] 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. [...]
because there's no way to account for the value of intangibles otherwise!
[...] 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. [...]
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.
it's weird to think of microsoft as a pro-infringement company but i guess when it suits them ...
think about how this relates to corporations changing IP law to suit them? power resources theory? and how countervailing forces need to push for better (more freeing) changes?
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."
something to cite when it comes to IP law (and the conventions/hegemonic ideology that it engenders/builds) being the only thing underpinning this shit
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.
good thing to cite as a supreme misunderstanding (or at least incomplete understanding) of how good capitalism is at adapting lmao.
[...] 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
[...] 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.