Derby Transformed

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On September 1, 2018, I spoke at Derby Transformed on two panels: one about media bias, and an all-female panel on Corbyn’s economic plans. I only have very loose and free-form notes, which I’ve copied+pasted below. The talk on Corbynomics was recorded:

Panel on media reform

• social media companies are not killing journalism on their own - latent tendencies
  • deep links between surveillance model and modern capitalism
  • for-profit ad-funded journalism was always unsustainable
  • but the internet age heightened these contradictions
• US tech billionaries buying up publications (wapo, recently TIME) beacuse they can
  • they’ve become middlemen/gatekeepers, extracting revenue as rent
  • siphoning the cut of ad revenue that journalism would have gotten
  • solution is more public funding. the profit motive undermines the media’s role in upholding democracy
  • ad-supported journalism was flawed from the outset
  • goog/fb: 50% of all digital advertising revenue in the UK. over 60% in US
  • google’s digitial news initiative: 150 million euros in europe in 3 years. tiny compared to revenue - not enough
• tax them more to fund journalism, as Corbyn proposed recently? that’s a start
  • but the important issue is ownership
  • the proposed state-run version of FB needs more discussion (have to grapple with the international elements)
  • these technologies allow transcending borders
• FB’s bias is not the problem
  • the problem is that it has so much unelected and unaccountable power in the first place
  • we need to dispense with the “great man theory”-inflected perspective, and demand wider democratic accountability
  • instead of focusing on privacy, focus on control
  • the goal should be to kill off their business model but keep the (often useful) communication technology they offer
  • need to unbundle: separate tech’s benefits (as a comms platform) from the drives of the corporation that currently owns it
  • nationalise, internationalise, whatever term you use - the goal is to take it out of the capital accumulation process
  • too big to fall under auspices/aegis of a single nation state
• need to make structural changes

Panel on Corbynomics

• we have to see capitalism as a system
  • main drive: tendency of capital to accumulation
  • from that you can derive the rest
• neoliberal project was deliberately designed to benefit the few
  • as a result, it could be technocratic
  • our project can’t
• to sketch out the contemporary economic landscape:
  • what is technology in a capitalist system?
  • apple, trillion dolar company
  • these companies have few employees, and huge cash hoards. rent extraction
• this is a fundamentally new situation, international in scope, scale of corporations never seen before
  • these companies own the digital infrastructure underpinning much of modern society, entwined with financialisation
• twin strands of neoliberalisation and globalisation
  • the corbyn project will have to deal with that
  • EU attempts to fine, tax, get small concessions - but not really substantially cutting power
  • one promising avenue: logistical choke points in these global value chains
  • the flipside of globalisation, that could be an avenue for resistance (solidarity extends beyond borders)
• we can’t just (shouldn’t just) replicate SV elsewhere
  • why is SV american anyway?
  • instead, take tech development out of the capital accumulation process
  • because digital technology supercharges capitalist tendencies
• we need to aim for silicon valley abolition
  • i.e., restructure society to get rid of this hierarchy that facilitates wealth concentration, rather than building equivalents elsewhere
  • we need a coordinated international projct, across national borders. including workers in the tech industry
  • the goal should be to share scientific/tech development with humanity
  • so we can steer it towards useful purposes (see mariana mazzucato’s work here) rather than as IP locked up within a corporation
• conclude: this sounds radical now, but tech is not developed in a vacuum
  • there is a larger social/political landscape
  • as the balance of class forces changes (through labour struggles, electoral victories, judicial victories, community efforts)
  • so does the realm of possibility
  • truly radical options begin to look not only feasible but inevitable
• goal: economic democracy
  • affordability as a political question, linked to the question of fake wealth

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