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
[...] Capitalism has always dreamed of activating the desire to consume, the ability to tap the human brain to stimulate its desire for products that it never contemplated needing. Data helps achieve this old dream. It makes us more malleable, easier to addict, prone to nudging. It's the reason that Amazon recommendations for your next purchase so often result in sales, or why Google ads result in clicks.
[...] data is infinitely renewable. It continuously allows the new monopolists to conduct experiments to master the anticipation of trends, to better understand customers, to build superior algorithms. Before he went to Google, as the company's chief economist, Hal Varian cowrote an essential handbook called Information Rules. Varian predicted that data would exaggerate the workings of the market. "Positive feedback makes the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, leading to extreme outcomes." One of these extreme outcomes is the proliferation of data-driven monopolies.
Because circulation was never a profitable business, the Internet hardly required a large leap of imagination. Instead of selling journalism to readers at a loss, media would give it away for nothing. Media executives bet everything on a fantasy: Publishing free articles on the Internet would enable newspapers and magazines to increase their readership manifold; advertising riches would follow the audience growth. [...]
It might have worked, were it not for Google and Facebook. Newspapers and magazines assumed that the Web would be like a giant newsstand--and readers would remain attached to the sterling reputations of their titles, their distinctive sensibility, and brand-name writers. The new megaportals changed all that. They became the entry point for the Internet--and when readers entered, they hardly paid attention to the names attached to the journalism they read.
With their enormous scale, Facebook and Google could undercut media, selling ad space for phenomenally little because they had nearly infinite windows of display. Since they specialized in collecting data on their users, they could guarantee advertisers a precisely micro-targeted audience. [...]
Advertising has become an unwinnable battle. Facebook and Google will always beat media. Between 2006 and 2017, advertiser spending on newspapers dropped by nearly 75 percent, with most of that money redirected to Facebook and Google. Money shifted because the tech monopolists simply do a much better job of steadily holding the attention of audiences.
[...] Technology and power are implicated in one another historically and in contemporary social arrangements. There is no experience of technology that is not at the same time an experience of a kind of social power, but it does not always involve domination. [...]
[...] part of technology design is precisely the art of making clear to the user what they can and cannot do with it. Technology design always involves both a closing off of the technology's innards into a "black box" and the projection of messages on its outer surface that will guide the user into successful operation of the artefact. There is a concealed politics here, akin to statecraft. How technological artefacts are presented to users involves a politics of design that reflects features of the social content. It is here that we find the politics of the relationship between technology and social power. [...]
[...] technology can embody valid knowledge and constitute a set of reliable, seemingly neutral tools or points of leverage over nature and at the same time constitute an instance of prevailing, hegemonic social rationality and so be implicated in social power. [...]
on Andrew Feenberg's critical theory, developed to address the mistaken (in his opinion) assumption that technology is predominantly being used to oppress workers simply because capitalism is "scientific"
The idea of hegemonic technological rationality is intended to encompass what the Frankfurt School called instrumental reason and what Weber analyzed as societal rationalization as these apply to technology design as a social practice. Feenberg introduces it in terms that clearly echo the Frankfurt School's definition of modern instrumental reason:
An effective hegemony need not be imposed in a continuing struggle between self-conscious agents but one that is reproduced unreflectively by the standard beliefs and practices of the society it dominates. Tradition and religion played that role for millennia; today, forms of rationality supply the hegemonic beliefs and practices.
In modern societies being instrumentally rational is common sense and capitalist efficiency is a value that we all strive to maintain. Failure to do so is widely perceived as evidence of some kind of defect, perhaps even immorality. [...] Hegemonic technological rationality enframes the judgements made about technology about key players in the design and implementation process, making some technologies appear sensible and obvious to them while others seem inherently less interesting or likely to succeed. The people making these kinds of choices [...] operate within a horizon that is set by this hegemonic rationality; they make decisions and judgements, but always within the parameters set by this ordering of the world. When presented with alternative designs they assess them in terms of the hegemonic technological rationality as it applies to their situation. They look for efficiency and they understand this in terms of enhanced control over the production process because this is the way to reduce costs and maximize desired outputs. [...]
cited from Feenberg's 2002 book Transforming Technology
this is pretty great
link this to the fact that the technologies behind FB/Google et al have BECOME implicated in the production process because a new market was created (for data in order to sell people shit)
[...] Management has long understood that using the iron fist is best only as a last resort. It is far cheaper to try to induce workers to cooperate through manipulating their fears and dreams. This is done through programs to foster identification with the company, as against other companies and the world; programs to reward individual contributions (even if they result in others losing their jobs); fostering competition between workers; and keeping open hopes for advancement. In order to fight unionization and maintain workforce stability, the model flexible plants do pay near the top of the industry scale, which is usually more than the average wage in the surrounding area because the companies locate in lowwage areas. But these plants also rely on speed-ups, outsourcing, automation, and extensive use of temporary workers to limit the total number of their higher-paid workers and keep up hopes among the lower-paid workers that they will be selected to move into the higher-paid group.
[...] 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). [...]