by
Nick Srnicek
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
[...] lean platforms are entirely reliant on a vast mania of surplus capital. The investment in tech start-ups today is less an alternative to the centrality of finance and more an expression of it. Just like the original tech boom, it was initiated and sustained by a loose monetary policy and by large amounts of capital seeking higher returns. While it is impossible to call then a bubble may burst, there are signs that the enthusiasm for this sector is already over. Tech stocks have taken a massive hit in 2016. There has been a wave of cutbacks on employee perks in the start-up sector--no more open bars and free snacks. [...] What is likely to happen is for a large number of these services to go out of business in the next couple of years, while others will move towards becoming luxury services, producing on-demand convenience at high prices. Whereas the tech boom of the 1990s at least left us with the basis for the internet, the tech boom of the 2010s looks as though it will simply leave us with premium services for the rich.
Rather than just regulating corporate platforms, efforts could be made to create public platforms--platforms owned and controlled by the people. (And, importantly, independent of the surveillance state apparatus.) This would mean investing the state's vast resources into the technology necessary to support these platforms and offering them as public utilities. More radically, we can push for postcapitalist platforms that make use of the data collected by these platforms in order to distribute resources, enable democratic participation, and generate further technological development. Perhaps today we must collectivise the platforms.
Perhaps the CEOs of Shell Oil or Citibank are indeed cruel profiteers and super-rich megalomaniacs. Perhaps they really are bad guys. That is not, and cannot be, the basis of a critique of capitalism. Capitalism is neither made nor defended by profiteers and super-rich megalomaniacs alone, nor did they produce the system that requires the structural position they fill. In reality, capitalism is produced and reproduced by elaborate, historically embedded, and powerful social and material relationships in which most us participate. In fact, many of us struggle to maintain those relationships, sometimes with all our might, because we feel like we have little choice. [...]
inspo for diss: cant just blame individual execs and investors etc but rather look at system
The problem is not that capitalism is a conspiracy of greedy people. The problem is that capitalism, as a way of organizing our collective life, does its best to force us to be greedy—and if that is true, then finger-pointing at nasty CEOs and investment bankers may be morally satisfying, but fails to address the problem. We are aiming for more than a world with nicer hedge-fund managers.
Two premises follow from this. First, we need to understand capitalism in more than just a wishy-washy, general way. If we want to change it, whether by tweaking or reworking the whole economic fabric of society, we need fairly detailed knowledge of the how, why, what, who, and where. Second, while critical theories (like Marxism) have a lot to offer, it is just as important to seriously engage capitalist theories of the capitalist economy, the ideas that make up modern orthodox ("neoclassical") economics and political economy. In other words, we have to recognize that as capitalism has developed, it has done so in tandem with ideas of human society with which it makes sense of itself.
Without some understanding of modern economic thinking, we cannot understand capitalism, because we cannot understand the logic and analysis that justifies it, that orders its institutions and gives it the legitimacy that has helped it survive and thrive for so long. Capitalism is organized the way it is because of how capital understands the world—an understanding, we must admit, shared by millions of people all over the world. Capitalism is not maintained by mere violence and deception. If it were, it would be far less robust. It is also sustained by a set of institutions, techniques, and ideas about human affairs and social goals that, for many people in the wealthy world, are unquestionable, as natural as gravity. Critics of capitalism ignore or dismiss these ideas at their peril.
inspo:
- "We are aiming for more than a world with nicer hedge-fund managers." but for SV billionaries
- " it is just as important to seriously engage capitalist theories of the capitalist economy / we have to recognize that as capitalism has developed, it has done so in tandem with ideas of human society with which it makes sense of itself" but for how tech views itself and what that teaches us about how things work
This underlines the fact that how we explain the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s is not merely "academic". On the contrary, it is enormously important today, both politically and economically, because we are constantly struggling over what lessons the past teaches. Different interpretations of the past lead to different conclusions regarding what can be done at present. But we must not reject orthodox explanations just because they are orthodox. In fact, capitalist reason provides some very helpful tools for understanding capitalism. There are aspects of contemporary economic life that appear to be very well diagnosed by conventional tools. Rather than rejecting orthodoxy because of its ideological predisposition to posit capital as the engine of historical progress, even in periods before capitalism itself existed, and to see workers and noncapitalists as "backward" forces, hindering progress, we need to see it for what it is: a set of ways of understanding the world that is a product of the very world it is trying to explain. Capitalist reason is embedded in and emerges from a particular, ideologically saturated world. Recognising the embeddedness of "reason" in its time is about as close to truth as we are ever going to get with respect to actually existing human communities. We have to resist the desire to dismiss it out of hand, and search instead for the truth in it, truth of which that reason might not itself be aware.
even if the rest of the book weren't fantastic, it would be worth reading just for this paragraph
for diss: not worth citing, but good framing inspo
[...] Neoliberalism is not just about getting rid of rules, or "deregulation." Removing tariffs, capital controls, currency pegs, restrictions on foreign ownership, and so forth are all essential elements of neoliberal regulatory programs, abolishing rules that limit firms' opportunity to maximize short-term returns. But states and firms and international institutions need not only to eliminate rules, they must also create new ones, imposing, extending, or deepening regulatory or legal structures where they were previously underdeveloped or nonexistent. For example, countries the world over have established intellectual property rights regimes for everything from medicinal plants to corporate logos, often where no such legal frameworks existed before. That is not deregulation by any stretch of the imagination. Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell were among the first to point out these complexities in "actually existing neoliberalism," which they label "roll-back" (deregulation) and "roll-out" (reregulation). Neoliberalism has always involved both.
the IP stuff especially
[...] The biggest problem for finance capital, and almost anybody else who wanted to borrow to invest, was not where to get the money but where to put it all [...]. Idle money is not capital; it is not accumulating [...]. [...]
extra liquidity due to low interest rates set by the Fed after the dotcom crisis (to try and stimulate recovery)
On the contrary, the explanation is far more straightforward: capital won. Sometimes with armies, sometimes with persuasion, sometimes with money, and sometimes by accident, but it won. For at least the last thirty or forty years, and this is increasingly true in nominally "noncapitalist" nation-states like China also, capital has proven richer, more powerful, more expansive, more convincing, and more real than any other political economic force on the planet. It is not a myth, it is not an elaborate hoax, and its wealth and dominance are not fictitious or illusory. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it has written the political economic rule book by which the world plays, and defined the terms and means by which one might "legitimately" break those rules. Socialists may have lost their ideological fire, or they may have read the writing on the wall and decided that given the options available to them, and the ultimate political and economic objectives to which socialism aims, i.e., the long-term betterment of citizens' everyday lives, their constituencies had to play by the rules, and the rules rule against being socialists.
on socialist parties in Spain endorsing austerity
"capital has proven richer, more powerful, more expansive, more convincing, and more real than any other political economic force on the planet. It is not a myth, it is not an elaborate hoax, and its wealth and dominance are not fictitious or illusory. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it has written the political economic rule book by which the world plays, and defined the terms and means by which one might "legitimately" break those rules" -> think about this
[...] most of these movements, through no fault or lack of imagination of their own, are embedded in an overwhelmingly capitalist matrix. They are islands in an ocean. More islands are always a welcome sight, but the ocean remains.
on local anticapitalist movements for specific things
inspo for framing my analysis of potential solutions
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?