archive/mc433
Franklin Foer,
Christian Fuchs,
Wolfgang Streeck,
Frank Pasquale,
Evgeny Morozov,
George Ritzer,
Nick Srnicek,
Nancy Fraser,
Arjun Appadurai,
Yann Moulier-Boutang
tech and justice essay quotes
[...] A full 94.7% say that oppose targeted ads on other platforms for which Facebook provides personal data to advertisers (N = 3948).
[...]
Such data show that one cannot assume users are happy about a trade-off between data commodification and "free" access, that they are rather critical of such a trade-off model and that there is a need for discussing alternatives to targeted advertising and corporate Internet platforms.
[...] Money is the dominant medium of capitalism [...] Those who control and accumulate money power are therefore equipped with a resource that puts them at a strategic advantage. This means that alternative online platforms in capitalism are facing power inequalities that stem from the asymmetric distributions of money and other resources that are inherent in capitalism. Practically this means that alternative platforms have less money and fewer users than Facebook. [...]
[...] Since the massification of computing they have in some small ways also been able to construct themselves in relation to other forms of life. (In the sense that Ludwig Wittgenstein means when he says, "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.") This self-sufficiency of software, in such a context, allows (in much the same way as it allows a programmer to think he or she is working on the formulation of a particularly interesting and chewy algorithm when working at another scale, perhaps more determining, on an insurance program to more finely exclude the poor from public services) a certain distance from social or cultural norms. Things can be done in software that don't require much dependence on other factors. [...]
The commodification of information means the enslavement of the world to the interests of those whose margins depend on information's scarcity, the vectoral class. The many potential benefits of free information are subordinated to the exclusive benefits in the margin. The infinite virtuality of the future is subordinated to the production and representation of futures that are repetitions of the same commodity form.
Production produces not only the object as commodity, but also the subject who appears as its consumer, even though it is actually its producer. Under vectoralist rule, society becomes indeed a "social factory" which makes subjects as much as objects out of the transformation of nature into second nature. "Labouring processes have moved outside the factory walls to invest the entire society." The capitalist class profits from the producing class as producer of objects. The vectoralist class profits from the producing class as consumer of its own subjectivity in commodified form.
great way of understanding audience commodification. from Hardt and Negri's Labour of Dionysus
Turow draws a rather depressing conclusion from all of this, but it’s hard to disagree: “We are entering a world of intensively customized content, a world in which publishers and even marketers will package personalized advertisements with soft news or entertainment that is tailored to fit both the selling needs of the ads and the reputation of the particular individual.” [...]
The implications of such shifts for our public life are profound: the kind of personalization described above might destroy the opportunities for solidarity and informed debate that occur when the entire polis has access to the same stories. But it’s even more important to keep certain modes of debate about these issues alive; we cannot just give in to the temptation to view such problems from the perspective of efficiency alone. Under the old system, where there was no way to measure the audience’s reaction to particular articles, the advertisers were engaging in practices that were terrifically inefficient—they had to place their ads in the newspaper without seeing the breakdown of how many people read each article—but this inefficiency was rather beneficial.
[...] yes, some of us might find ingenious engineering solutions to resist insidious marketing, but in all this celebration of modern technology, shouldn’t we also do something about the marketing itself? Why force consumers to monitor themselves and hone their willpower techniques if we can make it harder for food companies to sell unhealthy food or target children? Instead, political action all but disappears; rather than reforming the system, we just tinker with ourselves and tend to our reservoirs of willpower the way Swiss bankers tend to their vaults.
What is sold is advertisement, thus the paying customers are the advertisers, and what is being sold are the users themselves, not their content.
This means that the source of value that becomes Facebook's profits is the work done by the workers in the global fields and factories, who are producing the commodities being advertised to Facebook's audience.
The profits of the media monopolies are formed after surplus value has already been extracted. Their users are not exploited, but subjected, captured as an audience, and instrumentalized to extract surplus profits from other sectors of the ownership class.
Sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb, which own no vehicles or real-estate, capture profits from the operators of the cars and apartments for which they provide the marketplace.
Neither of these business models is very new. [...]
Rather than subvert capitalism, "sharing" platforms have been captured by it.
excellent take
[...] Our mobile phones pretend to be about fulfilling every desire [...] yet what is much scarier than the fact that the user can fulfill desire via the mobile phone is the possibility that the phone creates those desires in the first place. While the user thinks they are doing what they want, as if desires already exist and are simply facilitated by the device, in fact Google has an even greater power: the ability to create and organize desire itself. [...]
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.