Confronting the Challenges of Digital Capitalism

My conferencing year continues with the IAMCR 2023 in a boiling Lyon, France – it’s hot here even by Australian standards. The conference opens with a keynote by Christian Fuchs, which I’ll try to liveblog (though frankly this proved a challenge when I last blogged one of his presentations at ECREA 2014; let’s see how we go today). More liveblogging from regular conference sessions to follow over the week, at any rate.

Christian’s focus here is on explaining the challenges of digitalisation for humanity. This requires an understanding of the relationship between communication and the underlying economic structures, and several approaches to this (Althusser, Lukacs, Hall, and others) are available for this challenge. Overall, the economic sets limits and circumscribes the non-economic – we might imagine society as a productive flow, with the economy as the central stream and the political or cultural as side branches. Rivers can also be pristine or polluted, of course.

The economy builds on work; humans combine with the means of production to produce products, though not all these products are commercial: sociality, social relations, social structures, social systems, and society are also produced, especially through our communicative processes. And such processes also involve further mediators: third parties which link the individuals who communicate with one another.

The next question then is about capitalism: how might we define this? There are culturalist approaches that define the economy as culture and discourse; economistic approaches that emphasise the pursuit of profit through rational calculation; or Marxian approaches that explain capitalism as a societal formation that extends beyond the economy itself. Capitalism thus is a type of society, where the capitalist economy also sets non-economic conditions in society.

But culture, communication, media, and ideology don’t necessarily play a role in such views; there needs to be a broader view, which sees the various realms of society defined by the logic of accumulation (of capital, or power, of influence, of reputation, of attention, of respect). In addition to capitalism, the same might also be said of racism or patriarchy, for instance.

Moving on from capitalism as such to the idea of digital capitalism, two key features become especially important: prosumption and convergence. This might also be seen as a kind of digital liquefaction, where the computer becomes more than a means of production, but comes to be employed for all aspects of societal activity. This also enables the rise of some very large, highly profitable corporations that dominate such digital capitalism, while wages stagnate and poor countries’ debt increases.

This is an indicator for the heavy international competition, and the increasing polarisation of international geopolitical and economic relations. (There’s a side note here about nuclear war, though I’m not sure how this relates to anything to do with digital capitalism as such.)

Christian now moves to discussing the latest statistics on diversity at Meta, and points out that such diversity tends to be better in its non-technical workforce – but such employees often have the lowest wages and the most menial jobs: they are employed as cleaners both physical (i.e. janitors) and communicative (i.e. content moderators), for instance. Diversity at Meta thus often means a diversity of exploitation.

An alternative conception of digital capitalism is Castells’s concept of the network society, but Christian says this is troubling because it does not trouble everyone. For Castells, informational capitalism is a subsystem of the network society, rather than its predominant aspect, and Castells has recently acknowledged that his original vision may have been too optimistic; but he continues to see capitalism simply as an element of the network society. Similarly, Shoshana Zuboff has highlighted the emergence of surveillance capitalism, not least also built on the growing availability of digital trace data – but Christian says that surveillance has always been a key element of capitalism, from the surveillance of slave workers through time-and-motion studies to the present time.

The next topic to address is digital inequality, which drives alienation; this is a product of the logic of accumulation in (digital) capitalism, and in a digital context results especially in domination and disrespect. There’s now a sidebar again about the proportion of fossil and nuclear energy in the world’s energy supplies, and how they’re dominated by some very large global companies; Christian eventually links this to the theme of the keynote by pointing to the role of data centres and other digital technologies in driving up energy demands, and the global problems with digital waste.

By contrast, a good society is a society of the commons, and therefore requires a communication commons, too. Christian suggests that some of the tools towards this might be open access capitalism or open access socialism; we can start exploring this by exploring the business models of academic publishing, in fact, whose fees for open access publishing privilege rich, WEIRD-country scholars and universities.

‘Open access’ has thus been subsumed under the logic of capitalism, therefore, but such digital capitalism may also be challenged by embracing open access socialism; in the scholarly publishing world, for instance, journals in this space may be found in the Digital of Open Access Journals (but the specific licences used here matter – licences that permit commercial use may still be abused by digital capitalists). Taken to extremes, a fully open access model that prevents commercial exploitation may be called ‘diamond open access’, or even ‘radical diamond open access’.

Christian now briefly moves on to ‘big data’, computational social science research approaches, which he says is a new form of digital positivism that immunises the social sciences against philosophy; but the next topic of this talk is actually digital labour. During COVID-19, the home became a supra-space of the digital society, and this also introduced new inequalities – for those who have children, for those with insufficient home office spaces, network access, and technologies, etc.

And the next topic is digital violence, where he distinguishes between damaging and deadly forms of violence. Digital technologies also play a role in the digitalisation of war, of course, and there is a digital arms race in the development and deployment of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons at present. These deepen the ‘Prometheus gap’, and reduce moral considerations.

We’re zooming rapidly through topics now, and the next one is democratic socialism and international relations: this is needed to prevent a new world war and develop more mutually beneficial international relations. Christian champions the Tianxia philosophy that minimised mutual harm and maximises mutual benefits; to do so there may be a need to start from scratch and create new international organisations, beyond the comparatively powerless United Nations.

But how could this be done in reality? Can we build on existing global systems of technology, finance, and the Internet? Christian is sceptical since these have already been created by corporate, state, and ideological actors. We may need new underlying systems – such as a new Internet built on the idea of a digital commons –, but in combination the problems of corporatisation, digital acceleration, digital surveilance, anti-sociality on social media, algorithmic politics, digital individualism, ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’ (ugh!), cyber-sovereignty, digital tabloid content, influencer capitalism, and ‘fake news’ make this very difficult.

The alternative may the development of platform cooperatives: self-managed Internet platforms, but these are very difficult to establish and sustain in the long term, especially if they are to grow to a size that challenges the power of the major corporate media players. We may need public service Internet platforms building on a public service media logic in order to build the digital commons, therefore.

The public service Internet would thus rebuild the Internet with platforms operated by public service media; but public service media are themselves under threat of transforming into state media or large-scale bureaucracies prone to corruption and managerialism – they might themselves learn from the way that media and platform cooperatives work: not public/private but public/coop partnerships.

As I said in 2014: OK then.