MC433 - week 11
« Back to MC433These are my notes from December 07 for MC433 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.
The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.
Communication Futures
Readings
Inclusion and Democracy by Iris Marion Young (chapter 2)
- external exclusion from democratic deliberation (when outside interests dominate political discourse, due to inequalities of power/resources)
- internal inclusion: when certain groups (putatively part of the deliberation process) are just not respected as much
- mentions Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition
- didn’t really take away that much tbh
Lecture
- an excellent overview of the challenges posed by the economic dominance of the contemporary tech giants
- big 5 of tech (Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Facebook)
- their dominance isnt just evident in the services they provide, but in the way they control capital flows
- remember that when Microsoft acquired Linkedin for $26b, it did so primarily via a debt instrument to avoid a 35% repatriation tax
- any attempts to regulate them in terms of privacy or data protection are inadequate because they miss the more fundamental, structural aspects of their dominance (affirmative, not transformative)
- pace those in tech who stress that it’s not about the money, we must take a materialist approach to understand motives/paths
- on digital exclusion
- could it be a resource, a way of buying time to deliberate on how to reconstruct infrastructure?
- open Q: are algorithmic platforms like Google/Facebook inevitable?
- or are they just the result of technology being deployed in a world reliant on ad-fueled cosumption
- note to self: think about the Marxian idea of advertising as being part of the cost of circulation in the market (and not itself a source of value), and how that would fit in with modern-day ad-tech
Seminar
No notes