The Future of Digital Capitalism

Capitalism, Communication, and Critique, 2019

In a series of recent articles, Jakob Rigi has formulated an articulate and sophisticated Marxian view about the relationship between digital production and value theory. Anyone interested in the economic dynamics of FAMGA (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon) needs to come to terms with the position Rigi stakes out. In this article, I challenge Rigi's thesis that profits from the sale of digital information (DI) constitute rent. I do so by calling into question his conclusions concerning the valuelessness of DI. After summarising Rigi's core position and sketching out its entailments, I make the case that (1) Rigi's assertions about the intrinsic valuelessness of DI are not supported by the model of production he invokes; that (2) Rigi's valuelessness argument in fact presupposes that DI has value; that (3) far from furnishing evidence that DI is valueless and therefore a source of rent income, as Rigi holds, the existence of the intellectual property regime is precisely what allows DI to act as a congealment of value (i.e. labour time) in commodity form; and that (4) Rigi misapplies Marx's notion of reproduction to the sale/copy/distribution of DI. I offer this critique as an invitation for us to rethink, from a Marxian perspective, the status of the digital economy within the order of global capitalist value production.

X-Texte zu Kultur und Gesellschaft, 2022

Are robots taking away our jobs? Those who ask this question have misunderstood digitalisation - it is not an industrial revolution by other means. Sabine Pfeiffer searches for the actual novelties brought about by digitalisation and digital capitalism. In her analysis, she juxtaposes Marx's concept of productive force with the idea of distributive force. From the platform economy to artificial intelligence, Pfeiffer shows that digital capitalism is less about the efficient production of value, but rather about its fast, risk-free, and permanently secured realisation on the markets. The examination of this dynamic and its consequences also leads to the question of how destructive the distributive forces of digital capitalism might be.

Digital revolution has profound impacts on all aspects of cultural value chain and represents an unprecedented change in creation, production, distribution, broadcasting and consumption of cultural goods and services as well as in the remuneration of creators. In this view, digital technologies have positive and negative aspects in cultural sectors, according to how they are applied in national and regional contexts. In remote areas the question of the adjustment of local industries to the new technological opportunities becomes a key challenge to continue serving local and regional markets and accessing eventually global markets. Recent developments, such as the dematerialization of cultural products, the direct connections between creators and consumers, the convergence blurring the boundaries between cultural production, distribution and consumption and the increased cross-national connectivity, but also the impact of digital revolution on cultural behaviour and identity, raise a number of challenges and opportunities. Among these, the digital divide is still a barrier preventing access to culture in many developing countries. The globalised cultural offer and access increases the quantity and availability of cultural works, but not necessarily their visibility and diversity. The over-concentration of data on a small number of privately-owned global platforms implies that investment in cultural and digital infrastructure is driven mainly by economic interests and market optimization. Moreover, the issue of intellectual property protection is crucial insofar as copyright legislation is strongly affected by the transnational and intangible nature of online companies and the lack of updated norms. Finally the huge creative possibilities offered to artists by machine learning and artificial intelligence remain still largely untapped.

Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age, 2015

Palgrave Communications

This article proceeds in two distinct parts. The first section engages with a deliberately small number of popular texts written by discriminating and interrogative consumers and producers of digital culture and society. While these may be dismissed as journalistic texts and sources by those of a more focused academic intent, here these texts are used because they are the connection between academic engagement and wider public readership. As such, they frame what can be termed the critical public engagement with digital capitalism. These texts are read in tandem with my thesis of immaterial capitalism and Marazzi's' The Violence of Financial Capitalism. The paper then concludes with what can be described as the 'manifesto turn' by raising some questions for a renewed engagement with digital society, to be undertaken from what is termed, an emergent critical digital humanities, as the site of critique and resistance. This is an exercise in what can be labelled Mongrel methodology and ideology, a neo-logism deliberately provocative in intent to signal a postacademic approach, chosen over such traditional descriptors as mixed-methods or assemblage and the like. As such, it may draw on Marxist thought but is not Marxist in ideology or final intent; it is critical of capitalism but acknowledges our ongoing existence and possibilities within it; it is written by an academic seeking to act as intermediary between academic and non-academic readings and responses. It is a deliberate act of provocation as a manifesto call for change.

Prometheus, 2023

Critical Review of Digital Capitalism and Distributive Forces by Sabine Pfeiffer (2022). Pfeiffer's analysis of "Digital Capitalism" provides a plausible account for the development of the current economic paradigm. On her account, what has changed primarily in the digital era are "distributive" forces rather than productive, such as advertising and marketing, transport and warehousing, and control and prediction. One of the underexplored implications of her work is that the profit needed to sustain capitalism is nearing crisis, as there are decreasing ways to enhance profit generation.

2018

The digital sphere can be studied as one of the most mature materialisations of the process of abstraction that accompanies capitalism. It is also a framework where subjectivity internalises the abstract form of commodities even further. In this sense, the Internet is the home of an abstract nature that is linked to a particular reification process that characterises post-Fordist production and consumption. This process can be named “eidetisation”. My basic assumption is that the process of reification is being intensified with the digitalisation of the capitalist system. I will begin discussing the concept of reification as a specific form of alienation, stressing that the reification of society changes and intensifies in as much as capitalist production and consumption evolve. Then I will consider the process of abstraction as one of the main elements of reification. Finally, I will try to identify some distinctive traits within the process of “eidetisation”.

This article focuses on five flaws of Christian Fuchs' approach of Web 2.0 economy. Here, Fuchs' views on immaterial production, productivity of labor, commodification of users' data, underestimation of financial aspects of digital economy, and the violation of Marx's laws of value production, rate of exploitation, fall tendency of profit rate, and overproduction crisis are put into question. This article defends the thesis Fuchs fails to apply Marxian political economy to the contemporary phenomena of Web 2.0 economy. It is possible to avoid Fuchs' errors, and another approach is possible to remake Marxism relevant for an analysis of the new media economy. The concept of digital labor is one of the hotly debated issues in contemporary theories on new media economy. Put roughly, digital labor clusters around the questions of how communicative infrastructures of digital media are commercialized and commodified, where the economic value and profit of the new media companies come from, what social consequences the commercial captures of communicative infrastructures imply, and which theoretical paradigm to apply. The last issue involves political assessments that not only analyze the economical nature of digital media but also intervene in social consequences of the very reality of them.

Theorists of post capitalism have recently argued for a more or less inevitable end to capitalism. They assume that private accumulation is systematically blocked by the inability of capitalist corporations to create revenues by setting prices as they lose control over the reproduction of their commodities and that in this process, capitalist labour will eventually disappear. Drawing on a case study of Amazon and thoughts on the policies of other leading digital corporations, we challenge these assumptions. Key corporate players of digitization are trying to become powerful monopolies and have partly succeeded in doing so, using the network effects and scaling opportunities of digital goods and building socio-technical ecosystems. These strategies have led to the development of in part isomorphic structures, hence creating a situation of oligopolistic market competition. We draw on basic assumptions of monopoly capital theory to argue that in this situation labour process rationalization becomes key to the corporation's competitive strategies. We see the expansion of digital control and the organizational structures applied by key corporate players of the digital economy as evidence for the expansion of capitalist labour, not its reduction.

2017

In recent years the birth of ‘digital production’ has spurred a lively theoretical debate in political economy, seeking to understand the implications of ‘immaterial labour’ for the labour theory of value. These discussions have identified a number of theoretical challenges pertaining to the conceptualization of capitalist production in digital space. In particular, scholars have been puzzled by the question of how the notion of ‘abstract labour-time’ applies to immaterial labour, how the ‘free use’ of websites/applications is compatible with ‘commodity production’, what role ‘users’ play in the production process, and whether digital firms can be simply seen as rent-seekers disengaged from value-production altogether. In this paper I present an answer to these questions using Marx’s Circuits of Capital model which allows a clear understanding of ‘commodity production’ and ‘labour-processes’ to be drawn in any microeconomic arrangement. I then complement this theoretical analysis wi...

Value in a Digital World, 2017

The Information Society, 2014

In their assessment of value creation through prosumption and other activities related to the use of digital technologies, despite significant differences, Christian Fuchs, Adam Arvidsson (and with Arvidsson, Eleanor Colleoni) misinterpret Marx's value theory. Through their analyses, a totalizing or new form of capitalism is said to have emerged but these, I argue, entail demonstrably idealist theorizations. One important outcome is

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2017

In the light of the growth crisis of contemporary capitalism, the digitalisation of the economy fosters hopes for spectacular productivity gains, giving economic growth a new impetus. However, such predictions ignore the fact that the growth crisis of contemporary capitalism is mainly a result of weak private demand. I argue that digitalisation represents a macro-strategy for economic transformation explicitly tackling this aspect. However, while several strategies aimed at rationalising consumption can be observed in leading digital economy companies, instead of solving the consumption problem by increasing demand, they tend to exacerbate the structural weakness of consumption. I coin the term ‘consumption dilemma’ to mark this phenomenon and briefly stress its implications for union policies.

The paper was presented at ESA RN18 Mid-Term Conference "Rethinking power in communicative capitalism. Critical Perspectives on Media, Culture and Society" (September 8-10, 2016, Lisbon, ISCTE-IUL).