An
earlier version of this article was presented to the Technology and Democracy
project at CRASSH, Cambridge University, 29 September 2015. A footnoted copy is
available at www.informationobservatory.info
Visit of Deng Xiaoping to Johnson Space Centre, 1979. – Great Images in NASA. Public Domain via Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.The International Monetary Fund warned
last week that, nearly eight years after the global financial crisis,
still-sluggish economic growth might combine with a new financial shock to tip
the world back into recession. Meanwhile, however, investment in information
and communications technologies – long venerated as a growth dynamo – remains
high. How may we clarify this apparent contradiction?
The concept of “digital capitalism” may help. Great changes are ramifying around
digital networks; at the same time, abiding political economic processes carry
forward. I developed the idea of digital capitalism for this reason: a
phase-change is occurring within capitalism.
Before turning to consider the problems
that confront digital capitalism today, I will trace four features of its
industrial profile and give an account of its political development.
The
structural profile of digital capitalism
Unevenly, across many decades, the
industrial revolution gripped not only manufacturing but also agriculture,
trade and, indeed, information.
Aileen Fyfe captures this change in characterizing nineteenth-century British
publishing as “steam-powered
knowledge.” Similarly, the applications of digital networks today stretch
beyond a discrete information sector. Digital systems and services have been
bolted to all parts of the political
economy.
This carries ramifications. One is that it
is shortsighted to equate the
digital merely with familiar consumer markets, as for search engines, smart
phones and social networks. Consumer
expenditures on digital goods and services account for an estimated 30 percent
of the worldwide total. Nor is it sufficient to try to grasp the digital merely
by focusing only on vendors – whether IBM and AT&T in the 1970s; or Microsoft
and Intel a decade or two later; or Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple today. Digital
capitalism has been constructed, and reconstructed, not only by suppliers but
also by corporate users on the demand
side: the likes of Wal-Mart and GM and Exxon-Mobil and Monsanto and JP
Morgan Chase. Later, we’ll see that these business users’ importance has been
political as well as economic.
A second point pertains to the chronology
and character of capital investment in what the Census Bureau now enumerates
under the category of “Information Processing Equipment and Software.” US
capital investment in networks of course began to escalate long ago – well
before the postwar period favored by most conceptions of the information
society, and well before the arrival of microelectronics. Private line
telegraphs – lines entirely dedicated to traffic sent and received by a single
business user, which leased them from a carrier on a monthly basis – saw widening
use, especially by large banks, meat packers, and by the Standard Oil Company,
between the 1880s and the 1910s. So-called “industrial radio services”
thereupon proceeded to apply new wireless technology to the operations of
railroads, power transmission systems, department store chains, airplane
operating companies and newspapers. By 1947, for
example, US oil companies, had built 500 radio stations and obtained
licenses to 49 radio frequencies in their search for oil deposits; they began
to use microwave radio in order to send data produced by their new offshore
drilling rigs to geologists and engineers located at their headquarters by the
1950s. The political scientist Murray Edelman and the
economist Dallas
Smythe sought to place these neglected network services on the academic
agenda during the 1950s.
Capital investment in information
processing equipment and software, however, accelerated sharply after the recession
of the early 1970s. Expenditures on computing and accounting equipment, office
machines, communication equipment, and instruments soon became the largest
single category of capital investment in equipment – and a key driver of
economic growth in their own right. Data carriage took several forms: by adding
specialized equipment the national voice telecommunications infrastructure could
be adapted to enable limited data transfer; and big organizational users also
could lease dedicated private circuits and contract for commercial packet
switched service. Data networking was fractured, however, as companies and even
individual corporate departments became locked in by competing vendors’ proprietary
products. With the growth of the Internet after the mid-1980s, this
fragmentation diminished somewhat, and businesses again increased their
outlays. James
Cortada cites an internal IBM estimate that ICT investment escalated from
38 to 55 percent of all equipment spending between 1990 and 2001.
Sectoral variation was, and remains, considerable.
Forestry, fishing and agricultural services account for a small portion of the 2013
US total ($153 million in 2013).
Manufacturing claims a much larger share ($37 billion). Professional,
scientific and technical services also are very considerable ($30 billion in
2013). The second-top category is finance and insurance ($60 billion). The
largest spender is the information industry itself, inclusive of everything
from publishing to computer services: its collective outlay has spiraled to $86
billion.
Digital networks did not free capitalism from
its crisis tendencies, but became embedded in them: this is my third point.
By the early 2000s, financial
intermediaries had been spearheading the development of digital systems and
services for decades. The largest US financial companies – such as JP Morgan
Chase – spent billions of dollars each year on ICTs, and boasted IT and
software staffs numbering in the thousands. This titanic build-up of networked
finance occurred as banks pushed debt on every institution and packaged it
in a staggering variety of instruments. Banks institutionalized fee-based products,
own-account trades, and off-the-books investment vehicles, even as they also
continually increased their own leverage – and, with it, risk. This opaque,
complex, and rickety system crashed, when some US residential mortgage holders
ceased to make payments. Leverage – debt – was the fuel that stoked this fire,
and networked finance had spread debt literally everywhere. In the aftermath of
the crisis, menacingly, networked finance and the volatility that accompanies
it have carried forward. networked finance had spread
debt literally everywhere. In the aftermath of the crisis, menacingly,
networked finance and the volatility that accompanies it have carried forward.
That networks were bearers of crisis again
became apparent as the crisis cascaded into the wider economy. Manufacturers had
deployed digital networks to automate and to outsource production tasks; and to
disperse
their operations in order to improve market access and/or to cheapen the cost
of labor. This great buildup of manufacturing networks provided no guarantee of
corporate profitability. GM spent tens of billions of dollars on ICTs between
1970 and 2007, but after the crisis erupted, the biggest US automaker still had
to be rescued by the US Government. The underlying problem was that manufacturers’
networks had been folded into another sweeping crisis tendency as international
competition engendered overcapacity – that is, more plants and factories than
were needed to supply the global market.
This reorganization of manufacturing production
contributed to what David
Harvey calls “wage repression” throughout working-class communities in the
wealthy countries, as automakers responded by cutting high-wage union jobs. Reciprocal
hits to demand were predictable. The average age of vehicles on the road in the
United States hit an all-time high this year: 11.5 years. This has
been attributed to quality improvements; but for many consumers, it seems
certain that hard times were the decisive factor: by 2015 both new and used car
owners were holding onto their vehicles for more than two full years beyond
what had been the average in 2006.
And again, the underlying problem of overcapacity
has not abated. The big carmakers stampeded into China, and have come to depend
on Chinese buyers for around one-third of their global sales. As China’s
economy has slowed during the year just past, however, they have now also
turned to reduced
capacity at their dozens of joint-venture Chinese plants.
A fourth and final point: for decades – again,
beginning well before the Internet’s take-up – political leaders recognized that
the US information industry was a spectacular pole of growth within the capitalist
world economy. Heads of state made a point of paying homage to leading US tech
executives. Notably, China’s Deng
Xiaoping in 1979, Jiang Zemin in 1993, and Hu Jintao in 2006 each made
high-profile visits to US tech companies. France’s Jacques Chirac led a presidential
entourage to Silicon Valley in 1996 and, nearly twenty years on, Brazil’s Dilma
Rousseff and India’s Narendra Modi followed suit. How has the US worked its digital
magic? Can it be replicated? Failing that, as the McKinsey consultancy puts it,
“How
should you tap into Silicon Valley?” Because it is patent that these questions
command the attention of governments, I turn next to consider digital
capitalism’s political dimension.
Politics
In 2010, overall US expenditures on ICTs exceeded
those of the China, Japan, the UK and Russia combined. The US accounted for
more than half of global ICT research and development spending. The payoff was
enormous. A report
to the US Council on Foreign Relations underlined in 2013 that “The United
States captures more than 30 percent of global Internet revenues and more than
40 percent of net income.” US companies have claimed, and kept, a commanding
lead over nearly all global Internet markets. Political mobilization has been essential
in this success – or, if you prefer, this lopsided disparity. US companies have
claimed, and kept, a commanding lead over nearly all global Internet markets.
Political mobilization has been essential in this success – or, if you prefer,
this lopsided disparity.
By the mid-1960s, business users of
networks had been lobbying the US Federal Communications Commission for years,
using its piecemeal proceedings to demand improved access to specialized new
networking equipment and services. In 1967, the Democratic Administration of US
President Lyndon Baines Johnson convened a government Task Force on
Communications to assess whether a comprehensive policy shift was needed, to
accommodate the changes that were roiling through both telecommunications technology
and business demand for network systems. Should market entry be opened –
“liberalized” – within the emerging zones of data-network functionality? Could
liberalization be connected, somehow, to the President’s Great Society
programs?
Research at
archives and special collections reveals that the Task Force’s deliberations engendered
intense conflict.
While business users pressed for market openings, AT&T did everything in
its power to resist liberalization. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and
of LBJ’s unexpected decision, in March 1968, not to run for re-election, the
President lost the ability and, perhaps, the will, to pursue telecommunications
liberalization. The chairman of the Task Force, former Yale Law School dean and
Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow, implored LBJ neither to disband it nor to
suppress its conclusions. These included findings that computer communications should
be deregulated and that private line services should be opened to competition. President
Johnson complied with Rostow’s request, and handed off the Task Force’s final
report to his successor – unpublished and without a recommendation. The problem,
the President told a confidante, traced back to the Task Force staff: “some
boys, I think from Yale…just went berserk, it looked like to me.”
After months of deliberation, midway
through 1969 the new Administration reached its own decisions about networking
policy; and in their way these were as momentous as incoming President Nixon’s
concurrent decision to seek a rapprochement
with China. Breaking with ingrained
Republican habits of deference to AT&T, the Executive Branch began to rip out
the public service moorings that had anchored US networking policy – and
protected the giant carrier – for decades. Beginning at the edges of the
existing system, with satellites and cable television, high officials in the
Nixon White House coordinated the politics of a systematic liberalization
campaign with Nixon’s FCC Chairman, the powerful right-winger Dean Burch. They
belatedly released the Task Force Report, but stripped out its limited social
welfare proposals.
US Presidents Ford, NIxon, Bush, Reagan, Carter,1991.Wikicommons. Public domain.Some righrs reserved.An antitrust case against AT&T was
prepared during the Nixon years, brought to court by the US Justice Department
under Republican Gerald Ford, and settled by the break-up of the world’s
largest company under Republican Ronald Reagan. I am not suggesting that
liberalization may be credited to Republicans, but only to point out that they were
equal partners in this enterprise. Backed by a strengthening lobby of business
user trade groups and independent suppliers, the liberalization trend was
sustained by a bipartisan political coalition. Backed
by a strengthening lobby of business user trade groups and independent
suppliers, the liberalization trend was sustained by a bipartisan political
coalition.
To reduce a complicated and technical process
to its essentials, business users of networks and independent (i.e.,
non-AT&T) suppliers of networking equipment and services were granted expansive
freedom to pursue specialized networking initiatives as a proprietary matter. Pyramiding
increases in capital investment in information processing equipment and software
were predicated on this radical policy shift. Then-mostly unionized
telecommunications workers, by contrast, came into the crosshairs of the
market-opening trend; and their numbers dropped precipitously. A later president
of the Internet Society, Anthony Rutkowski, related that data communications had
“developed in a kind of golden nest,” as “special policies were crafted that
not only insulated this entire sector from virtually every kind of public
process or control, but also provided it with substantial public benefits.”
This was not a straight-line trend, and
there was no master blueprint. As the world’s single largest national market, however,
the US political commitment to network liberalization and the profit projects
that rested on it radiated powerfully outward. During the 1980s and early
1990s, for example, the US Trade Representative pushed Brazil to relax its
import-substitution policies for “informatics,” using newly augmented
powers. The US State and Commerce
Departments meanwhile battled against European initiatives to monitor and
restrict corporate trans-border data flows. On another front, under Reagan and
Thatcher, the US and Britain together mounted a successful attack on the
Non-Aligned Movement’s drive for a New International Information Order – which
had tried to insist that economic redistribution rather than profit
maximization should drive policy. Stringent
intellectual property laws to suppress some of the radical potential of
networks, as Brian
Winston might put it, became still another key objective
of US economic diplomacy.
Big business users, tech vendors, multilateral
agencies, and the US Executive Branch labored in behalf of policies to widen the
scope of digital profit projects worldwide.
Their achievement was breathtaking. Between
1988, when Chile privatized its incumbent telecommunications operator, and
2005, more than 80 less developed countries underwent network privatization. Western
Europe and Japan were on board. Additional market-opening policies became
enshrined via the International Telecommunication Union in 1988, and through a
1997 WTO treaty, the Basic Telecommunications Agreement. Significant
national variations persisted but, as business users and independent equipment
suppliers gained political priority, foreign investment policies,
interconnection rules, and policies governing use of networks all were relaxed.
The Internet’s rise during the 1990s rested
on these foundations; it, in turn, altered the center of gravity of networking.
Monopoly national telecommunications systems operated by government ministries were
supplanted – or at least overlaid – by decentralized “autonomous” systems
operated and interconnected by transnational companies. systems operated by government
ministries were supplanted – or at least overlaid – by decentralized
“autonomous” systems operated and interconnected by transnational companies. At
the same time (flouting the expectations of most leftists), network access
began to expand beyond all precedent – far beyond the wealthy countries. FDI flowing into the less developed countries’
telecommunications systems increased tenfold during the decade after 1990. Though
ravaging disparities did not disappear, networks drew more investment in poor-world
countries—hundreds of billions of dollars—than any other industry. This
expansion continued, as green-field projects replaced privatizations as the
major growth nexus.
This spectacular enlargement of network
access may have dampened awareness that the Internet in fact does possess a loose
political-economic control structure – certainly, there was a lot of talk during
the 1990s about how the Internet “routes around control.” Throughout its formative years, the Internet
had been managed by the US Department of Defense. During the 1980s and 1990s, this
arrangement underwent a series of transitions. Working with the National Science Foundation
and its networking contractors, IBM and MCI, universities extended Internet
access to a larger share of academics but, in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
corporate providers and corporate users pressed to alter these largely
noncommercial arrangements. Privatization of the Internet followed. Concurrently, this network of networks
exploded internationally. During the later 1990s, the US Government vested
management of a now-global Internet in a nonprofit California corporation, ICANN.
ICANN possessed responsibility for the Internet’s system of unique identifiers
and participated in its technical development. VeriSign, a shadowy corporation
headquartered in spook-ish Virginia, was accorded a crucial operational role;
while ICANN itself was legally bound to report to the US Commerce Department.
In practice, these arrangements conferred
power on high-tech companies and corporate trademark owners and on the US
Executive Branch. They are notable for
downgrading the democratic remit of the US Federal Communications Commission,
which ostensibly regulates civilian telecommunications. And they signified that
US negotiators had succeeded in getting the international community to
acquiesce in a US-centric extraterritorial Internet. From the outset, there was
disagreement; but the US prevailed. This, after all, was the “unipolar” moment
that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of
capitalism in China.
An unabashed triumphalism set in. Hailed
for disrupting industries, the Internet’s overriding function – evident only at
greater scale – was to deepen and modernize capitalism. After the puncturing of
the Internet bubble between 1999-2001, this project resumed.
Geo-political
economy of information
Neither the capitalist political economy nor
the Internet that now operated as one of its growth poles was stable. After a
financial panic, a deep global economic slump set in during 2008. This engendered
persistent stagnation, and rising geopolitical-economic conflict, and signaled the
start of an era of open-ended uncertainty. US negotiators had succeeded in getting the international community to acquiesce in a US-centric extraterritorial Internet.
Overcapacity and low investment, high
unemployment and high indebtedness have been coupled to a gathering deflationary
impulse: eight years on, we remain
mired in stagnation.
I call our condition a “digital depression,” because networks were ubiquitously
embedded in the political economy that generated the downturn; and because, for
any robust upswing to occur, massive new commodification projects will be
needed – and these too will be configured around network systems.
Statistics compiled by the US Census Bureau
show that, even as stagnation set in, the process of digitization was sustained.
In 2007, on the verge of the financial crisis, US capital expenditures on
information processing equipment and software totaled $264 billion; in 2013,
they came to $331 billion. This is a nominal increase of around 25 percent, spread
over an interval in which inflation increased by around 15 percent. Even amid
the worst slump since the 1930s, the dynamism of information systems and
services is unmistakable. Global submarine network construction provides a
leading example: the 65 Terabits per second of new capacity added worldwide in
2014 equates to almost the entire amount of bandwidth in service in 2011. And
the costs of Internet transit have dropped over the last four years (2012 to
2015) by a global average of 14% annually. The first new cables to be laid for
twelve years in the high-traffic trans-Atlantic market are about to come
online.
I have underlined that the scale and scope
of digitization give it a strategic importance for virtually every industry. The
seemingly boundless elasticity of digital technology likewise enables it to
participate in innumerable commodification projects. The information industry
is the largest sectoral contributor to ICT investment because it is leading the recomposition of the overall political
economy, that is, because it is
spearheading a wide range of commodification projects. the US prevailed. This, after all, was the “unipolar” moment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism in China.
The most visible expression of this trend
has been rapidly deepening commercialization of cultural interaction and
personal life, via search engines, social networks, e-commerce, smartphones –
and omnipresent surveillance. However, huge R&D spending and back-end
investments in data centers, Internet exchange facilities and, in the case of content
providers such as Google, trans-oceanic as well as metropolitan fiber optic cable
networks, have granted to big purveyors of consumer Internet services an
impressive capacity for diversification. Amazon has seized the lead in
marketing specialized cloud
computing services to industrial and governmental users. Facebook is
rolling out a private variant of its service – Facebook
at Work – to challenge enterprise software companies by winning revenues
from corporate subscriptions rather than advertising. Professional services
like accounting are being beset by digital interlopers; as are banks and other
financial intermediaries. Driverless – that is, software-intensive – cars under
development at Google and Apple have already forced the world’s automakers onto
defense.
Sensors, IP addresses, and technical standards to enable machine-to-machine
interoperability, are helping the tech giants to scale the walls of other
existing industries, as they attempt to synthesize what GE, IBM, and Cisco call
“the industrial Internet.” So-called smart cities and online education
constitute still other vectors
of commodification. Today’s commodification initiatives are aimed at both
new and existing areas of practice, and use digital media not only to encroach
on once-remote industries but also to
claw nonmarket institutions – universities, museums, and government
agencies – into the for-profit sector. We are nowhere near the end of the line,
as far as capital is concerned. Digital
capitalism therefore remains a work-in-progress.
Though US Internet companies are in the
forefront of this global movement, it should not be reduced merely to a US
power projection: the rapidly expanding scope of digitization means that profit
projects also are opening for companies based elsewhere. Units of capital based
in Europe, Japan, India, Korea and other countries are actively participating –
or hoping to do so soon. Early in 2015, notably, six of the 20 most valuable
Internet companies were reportedly domiciled
in China; and China also is home-base for the world’s most valuable
carrier, China Mobile, and a globally ascendant equipment vendor, Huawei.
Commodification, however, is not a smooth
trend nor is it governed by consensus. Who – which companies, headquartered in
which countries – will appropriate the fruits of what pundits call “the digital
economy”? Who will capture the new sites of profit? And how do governments interact with – and
shape – the commodification process? Though sometimes disguised, serious geopolitical-economic
battles are breaking out.
The Financial
Times sums
it up well: “Talk of protectionism once meant bemoaning barriers being
erected in far-off lands for offcuts of beef or steel rods, but in Washington
these days the protectionism fears have gone digital.” The Obama Administration
offers staunch support to US capital’s digital expansionism, for example, by
trying to quell or to contain European Union attempts to restrict it. President
Obama himself cast this imperative in
sharp terms: “We have owned the internet.
Our companies have created it, expanded it, perfected it. [European
companies] who you know, can’t compete with ours, are essentially trying to set
up some roadblocks.” “We have owned the internet. Our companies have created it, expanded it,
perfected it. [European companies] who you know, can’t compete with ours, are
essentially trying to set up some roadblocks.” In response, the EU publicly
denies that a redesign of its regulatory framework will discriminate against US
providers. However, simply by forcing the US Internet giants onto defense, both
its antitrust investigations and its potentially encompassing “digital
platforms” inquiry
open space for European capital. German interests in particular – both media companies
led by Springer and manufacturers and engineering companies such as Bosch – are
keen to exploit it. In their turn, Google, Facebook and the rest have expanded their
lobbying in Brussels.
Geopolitical-economic fights over
digitization are also proliferating beyond Europe. Google is being
accused of abusing its dominance in online search by India’s Competition
Commission. Russian antitrust authorities have
ruled that Google broke that country’s competition rules. Arguably the most
significant conflict pits the US against a primary economic partner: China.
An influential segment of elite US opinion about
China has recently begun
to harden, and economic issues pertaining to the tech industry are high on
its list of concerns. China-based cyber-espionage and corporate hacking have
been accorded the greatest publicity. US
officials, however, also are alarmed that China’s domestic regulations for
digital systems and applications “are about protectionism and favoring Chinese
companies,” as the US Trade Representative declared this year. In a contrast
with Europe’s defensive efforts, at least thus far, Chinese policies aimed “at
keeping US businesses out” have succeeded at reserving big chunks of the
Chinese Internet market for a handful of locally headquartered conglomerates.
Conflict
over this issue permeated Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
recent state visit to the US. President Obama set the stage for Xi’s arrival by
declaring to the Business Roundtable, a top business lobby, that his Administration
was preparing tough measures to counter Chinese cyber-commercial espionage. Again, however, the
US’s economic agenda with China prominently included a demand to improve market
access for US companies. As former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson phrased
it: “Is China looking to open things up just for the private sector in
China, or is it for multinationals as well?” US Internet companies in
particular want to make inroads into China’s huge and still rapidly developing
digital markets, before it is mostly locked up by Chinese Internet companies
led by Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.
Xi
thus arrived in the US possessed of leverage that had been unavailable to his predecessors.
To the consternation of US officials, Xi began his visit by organizing a
technology forum in Seattle to demonstrate what the New York Times called China’s “sway
over the American tech industry.” Joined by leaders of top Chinese Internet
companies, executives from Apple, Cisco, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook,
QualComm, Intel, LinkedIn, AirBnB and Sequoia Capital posed
for a photo flanked around Xi Jinping.
Geopolitical-economic conflicts over
digitization are not confined to bilateral relationships, but also exhibit a vital
multilateral dimension. Allied with dozens of other countries, China has helped
propel a political campaign to pull the Internet’s control structure out of its
US-centric orbit. The US of course is determined to
resist such an outcome. As they entered into this geopolitical-economic
contest, Edward Snowden’s globally publicized disclosures cut ground out from
under the US. As they entered into this
geopolitical-economic contest, Edward Snowden’s globally publicized disclosures
cut ground out from under the US.
The US had cast its stewardship of
the global Internet as a matter of high moral principle: human rights and Internet freedom. After
Snowden, however it could not be denied that, in cooperation with a
score of US Internet companies, the US Government had routinely used the
Internet to conduct worldwide mass surveillance; and it seemed plain that the
Internet’s US-centric control-structure dovetailed with this purpose. The mechanism
of global Internet governance in turn incarnated not an overriding state commitment
to human rights, but US hegemony over a transnational digital capitalism. And
as one
writer put it, “countries insisting on regaining ‘technological
sovereignty’ from Silicon Valley and the National Security Agency…extend from
Bolivia to Russia and from China to Argentina.”
Efforts to
alter the prevailing unbalanced arrangements therefore strengthened. From one
side, in response to Snowden’s disclosures that a real threat was being posed
to Europeans’ privacy rights, early in October, the European
Court of Justice invalidated the “safe
harbor” clause that had enabled unrestricted flows of personal information
from the EU to the US. This action served to strengthen
the EU’s bargaining position in negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership. From a different side, in September a Chinese Internet
administrator charged directly before the US Commerce Department that the
Internet’s “overall accountability
mechanism should not be subject only to the United States legal system but
should resolve all issues under the international legal system accepted by all
parties.”
Max Schrems receives a 'digital courage' award for challenging 'Safe Harbour', April 2015. Wikicommons/Eleleleven.Some rights reserved.Though the US may give up some ground in
relation to its contract with ICANN, US political leaders still are pushing aggressively
to assert US capital’s economic claims to cyberspace. There is, however, no
guarantee that they will succeed as they would prefer – because other states and
other units of capital are pushing back. The US had cast its stewardship of the global Internet as a matter of high moral principle: human rights and Internet freedom. After Snowden, however,
Conclusion
Capitalist development has undergone – and
inflicted – violent historical dislocations in the past. The rise of agrarian
capitalism in early modern Europe began the process of tearing small farmers
and peasants from the land, more or less at the same time as European armies
were subjugating indigenous peoples throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. In
reference to a second fundamental mutation within capitalist development, Maxine
Berg underlines, “The machine was not an impersonal achievement to those
living through the Industrial Revolution…it was an issue. The machinery
question in early nineteenth-century Britain was the question of the sources of
technical progress and the impact of the introduction of the new technology of
the period on the total economy and society.”
So it is with respect to digital capitalism
today, as we find ourselves living amid the shocks of network-enabled
commodification. For most of the world’s people, whether profitable growth may
be renewed, and by whom, actually are inconsequential questions. The
life-and-death issues are different. The planetary ecological emergency is one,
as digital capitalism continues to exalt growth rather than stewardship. Another
is that digital capitalism is ripping the thin fabric of democracy, even where
a semblance of it exists – as governments expand repressive practices, and
corporations stake claims to profit out of public goods and institute 24/7
surveillance of workers and customers. A third is that a new wave of digitized
automation threatens to turn an unprecedented number of jobs themselves into
luxuries. Social actors apart from states and corporations are likely to
respond to these attacks by renewing demands for a society beyond capital. Nothing else is likely to suffice.