Activity

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-mili…

[...] 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--i…

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 economi…

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 …

[...] By rewarding advertisers who can successfully predict the keywords that users type in and by punishing those who cannot, Google hopes that AdWords can be relevant and useful to online search.

Nevertheless, AdWords is only profitable because it is a vertically integrated system in which Goo…