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
That the vectoralist class has replaced capital as the dominant exploiting class can be seen in the form that the leading corporations take. These firms divest themselves of their productive capacity, as this is no longer a source of power. They rely on a competing mass of capitalist contractors for the manufacture of their products. Their power lies in monopolizing intellectual property--patents, copyrights and trademarks--and the means of reproducing their value--the vectors of communication. The privatization of information becomes the dominant, rather than a subsidiary, aspect of commodified life.
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
The vetoralist class contributes, unwittingly, to the development of the vectoral world within which the gift as the limit to property could return, but soon recognizes its error. As the vectoral economy, develops, less and less of it takes the form of a public space of open and free gift exchange, and more and more of it takes the form of commodified production for private sale. The vectoralist class can grudgingly accommodate some margin of public information, as the price it pays to the state for the furtherance of its main interests. But the vectoralist class quite rightly sees in the gift a challenge not just to its profits but to its very existence. The gift economy is the virtual proof for the parasitic and superfluous nature of vectoralists as a class.
Referring to FLOSS and similar ventures
What may be free from the commodity form altogether is not land, not capital, but information. All other forms of property are exclusive. The ownership by one excludes, by definition, the ownership by another. The class relation may be mitigated, but not overcome. The vectoralist class sees in the development of vectoral means of production and distribution the ultimate means to commodify the globe through the commodification of information. But the hacker class can realize from the same historic opportunity that the means are at hand to decommodify information. Information is the gift that may be shared without diminishing anything but its scarcity. Information is that which can escape the commodify form altogether. Information escapes the commodity as history and history as commodification. It frees abstraction from its commodified phase.
The vectoralist class discovers--irony of ironies!--a scarcity of scarcity. It struggles to find new "business models" for information, but ends up settling for its only reliable means of extracting a surplus from its artificial scarcity, through the formation of monopolies over every branch of its production. Stocks, flows and vectors of information are brought together in vast enterprises, with the sole purpose of extracting a surplus through the watertight commodification of all elements of the process. By denying to the producing classes any free means of reproducing their own culture, the vectoralist class hopes to extract a surplus from selling back to the producing classes their own souls. But the very strength of the vectoralist class--its capacity to monopolize the vector, points to its weakness. The only lack is the lack of necessity. The only necessity is the overcoming of necessity. The only scarcity is of scarcity itself.
in 334, he continues this point: eventually the vectoralist class will produce "a means of domination over the world that comes to dominate even its own exertions"
Latterly, the idea has been taken up by Silicon Valley luminaries and venture capitalists, some putting up money for the cause, as we shall see. They include Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar, Sam Altman, head of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, Albert Wenger, prominent venture capitalist, Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook, Elon Musk, founder of SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, Google's parent.
good overview
he breaks support for BI into multiple waves, with the fourth wave starting with the establishment of BIEN (his thing) in 1986; includes Stiglitz, Martin Wolf, Philippe van Parijs
citation for the fact that they're scared?
[...] His personal technical contribution built on a stream of inventions and ideas of others, yet he has gained most of the income attributable to those inventions and ideas as well as his own. And that income in turn is based on the lengthy monopoly he enjoys on Microsoft software and other products, thanks to patent and copyright laws that were vastly strengthened globally by the World Trade Organization in 1995. He was thus helped to gain his fortune by state and international regulations, rather than by his individual endeavour alone. His income is based largely not on 'merit' or 'hard work' but on artificial rules privileging a particular way of gaining income.
More often than not, individual wealth owes more to luck, laws and regulations, inheritance or fortunate timing than to individual brilliance. Leaving aside fortunes criminally obtained, many people have become rich through the commercial plunder of the commons that belong to all, and through rental income derived from the commercialization and privatization of public services and amenities. This is further justification for taxing rental income to give everybody a social dividend, a share of socially created wealth.
preach (though Slavoj Zizek's take on this, in note 1072, is way more metal)
on IP law underpinning success of companies like MS (though note that it's a bit diff for goog, fb, apple - not really IP law but rather lack of access to source code)
Perhaps the most polarizing claim from the report is that only 12 percent of all the revenue in the music industry ends up going to artists, a statistic that has been picked up by multiple press outlets.
“SiriusXM is incredibly profitable right now, but instead of sharing the profit with artists, they’re doing everything they can and hiring more lobbyists to pay artists less,” says Erickson, referring to SiriusXM’s recent efforts to combat the Music Modernization Act on Capitol Hill. “The idea that Spotify is going to become more profitable through diversifying its business, and then out of its generosity is going to start paying artists better, is also not consistent with what we’ve seen. We want all of these companies to do well, but ownership consolidation changes the incentives and it’s very difficult for a company not to start exercising that gatekeeper power in way that are disadvantageous to artists.”
"ownership consolidation changes the incentives and it’s very difficult for a company not to start exercising that gatekeeper power in way that are disadvantageous to artists"
^^^