Media, Culture and Economy seminar on platform capitalism

« Speaking

On November 29, 2018, I was a guest speker at a session of the “Media, Culture and Economy” unit of the “MA Media, Communications and Critical Practice” program at the London College of Communications (taught by Rebecca Bramall). The reading that week was Nick Srnicek’s book Platform Capitalism (2016), and I talked about the context of that book’s approach, as well as some of the stuff that’s happened since it was written, with a short Q&A afterward. You can find the notes I prepared for the talk below, along with a summary of the questions (the actual talk went off-script a lot).

---

My background

• currently writing a book
  • didn’t start out as a writer: computer science degree, scorned the humanities, really believed that tech would save the world & all the money in tech was deserved
• Google internship, Macromeasures, etc
• around the time Trump was elected, I started reading lots of books and basically discovered the humanities & socialism in one fell swoop
• moved to london to do a masters at LSE
  • moving to london was the best thing that ever happened to me
  • met activists on the ground here with momentum + other groups
  • also met writers/academics (including nick) whose work i admired
  • since jan, have been involved with Notes From Below, which taught the importance of worker power/class struggle (that’s what’s informed lots of my work lately - tech workers’ struggles, in solidarity with others resisting tech companies)

My approach

• it’s a structural approach
  • SV didn’t come out of nowhere; we have to situate it within the economy today, and historically
• it’s also an unabashedly normative take
  • if you’re looking for a defense of SV innovation, culture, etc, you won’t find that from me
  • mainstream politicians economists etc are all celebrating tech: entrepreneurship as engine of innovation/wealth creation/job creation
  • that’s not the only perspective; that perspective is only good for some
  • analogous to feudalism: imagine people who extol the virtues of monarchy; serfs who actually do the work are like yeah, sure. they know it’s not good for everyone
• it’s useful to think of SV as a class project
  • got the term from David Harvey, on neoliberalism being a class project, prioritising needs of capital over labour
  • can see SV as the industrial embodiment of the neoliberal ethos
• why “abolish silicon valley”?
  • we can’t tackle on its own without looking at the larger context
  • where does it come from? what are the roots
  • eventually you start to realise that it’s like the tip of an iceberg
  • hence any response must be a structural response

Context on the book

• (Matt Cole’s review in Salvage is good: Platform Capitalism and the Value Form)
• published in 2016, a Marxist analysis of contemporary digital landscape that is also very accessible, really quite groundbreaking
  • sharp contrast to most analyses of tech
  • mainstream economists etc tend to be pretty optimistic, may occasionally decry some decisions but overall value innovation
  • insider accounts can be critical, but not structural critiques. they also kind of seem to imagine things won’t change, don’t really draw on theoretical context
  • in the last few years, more critical accounts, but rarely radical or imaginative enough
  • a lot of the more radical critiques of tech etc locked up in academic journals or obtuse language
• nick came out of the accelerationist tradition (philosophy, theory) - PhD in int relations from LSE
  • but also very much a political tradition that i will broadly call “the left” (anticapitalist). includes academics, activists, workers - anticapitalist on the level of theory and/or action
  • so approaching tech as a non-techie, but in a way that is accessible & convincing even to tech people w/o a theory background
  • it was a huge revelation to me personally - i came across at the London Radical Bookfair in June 2017 & couldn’t put it down
  • 2013 blog post co-authored with alex williams, which eventually turned into a Verso book (Inventing the Future)

The book itself

• historical economic background: change from Fordism to post-Fordism (US vs Germany/Japan)
• asset-price keynesianism, inflating venture capital funds
• rise of neolib (explained in more detail in Inventing the Future): policy, attacks on trade unions
• the technology grew out of that soil (stage was set)
  • weak labour
  • overaccumulation of capital: too much capital seeking returns (corp savings, tax havens, easy monetary policy)
• 5 types of platforms
  • ad platforms (Google, FB) that analyse user data to sell ad space
  • cloud platforms (AWS, Salesforce) that own the hardware and software and charge subscription fees based on usage
  • industrial platforms (GE, Siemens), for making manufacturing more internet-connected and thus more efficient (and cheaper) - i think he’s merging this with product?
  • product platforms (Rolls Royce, Spotify) turning traditional goods into service, collecting rents/subscription fees
  • lean platforms (Uber, Airbnb) that don’t own any assets
• natural monopolies (see nick’s guardian article written earlier this year on nationalising tech companies)
  • capitalism wn’t fix this: data, network effects, and path dependency
  • also see Monopoly’s Fallacy by Hettie O’Brien
  • companies will just acquire their competitors
  • need policy responses to address that

The larger picture

• So that’s the book
  • It’s a very short book with a specific remit
  • There’s a lot that it leaves out on the topic it covers
  • I want to give some more context into the bigger picture and some things that have happened since the book was written
• alternative approaches
  • Yann Moulier-Boutang’s Cognitive Capitalism (2011): immaterial labour at least in the global north; manufacturing in global south
  • McKenzie Wark’s A Hcker Manifesto (2004): vectoralist class
    • i personally love this take - situates tech companies in the larger historical context
    • he talks about vectors, which is a little confusing, but it’s really just about commodifying information
    • What i really like about his work: gift economy, offers a solution (at least this utopian guiding light, north star, even if not a step-by-step process how to get there)
  • looking at the role of rent. tech has reconfigured capital flows so that rent > surplus value (global value chains, advertising) - see Carlo Vercellone
  • democracy: what has the internet done to democracy
    • pale, weak notion of democracy limited to ballot boxes
    • what has untethered capitalism, massive cap accumulation done to democracy. lobbying, media, culture
    • economic democracy most important: don’t have control over workplaces, or allocation of resources
    • the divide between pol & econ realms is itself an ideological construct, that depends on the prevailing political economic consensus (neoliberalism)
  • tangentially related: media studies approach to what comms platforms have done to the media
    • recommended reading on the decline of journalism - accelerated by goog/fb, but it was already in decline because of advertising & concentration of capital
    • should never have been a commodity in the first place
    • forcing metric-driven system, profits, rise of buzzfeed (but can’t sustain - layoffs cus failed to meet target)
    • robert mcchesney interview in catalyst: take these platforms out of the capital accumulation process
    • Think about goog/fb’s role in global value chains
  • individuals populating this industry (mostly focused on US context)
    • people like zuck: don’t just focus on their individual foibles; instead, see their prominence as the result of a larger structure. what factors led to his being one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world?
    • venture capitalists, what drives them. Old boy’s club. Mixed with entrepeneurs who “succeeded”. Diversity is terrible as you can imagine, esp class background. They really believe they’ve earned their place, deserve to make these funding decisions
    • tech workers, what drove them initially. meritocracy, individualist ethos, tied up with entrepeneruship capitalist ideology nuthsell
    • what drives new flood of tech workers (post-crash, who learned to code & found tech jobs due to student debt - so primarily financial rather than ideological reasons)

Where do we go from here?

• possible responses
  • policy: IPPR report (Digital Commonwealth) is a start (critical response from me here)
  • tech workers coalition. ethical reasons: Maven, Salesforce/Microsoft ICE, Dragonfly. not fighting for bread and butter demands but conditions (sexism racism), control (ethics), solidarity.
  • workers: gig economy, amazon warehouse workers
  • communities: amazon HQ2, Berlin resisting new google campus
• None of this will be easy
  • capitalist realism, unable to imagine a world other than how things are now, broadly speaking
  • Economic and social relations fade into the background, invisible, they become naturalised
  • we believe that there is no alternative to Silicon Valley, to innovation directed by a few, hoarding money, massive inequality
  • most of us are rendered helpless, locked in a world where our lives are mediated by devices we do not understand and cannot control
• But if we don’t like the world we live in now, we have to change the underlying causes
  • And it won’t be easy, but we have to act as if it’s possible.
  • a quote by one of my favourite writers, the late Mark Fisher: “Emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.”
• What we need, then, is an emancipatory politics
  • Not just directed at the big platforms, but recognising that the world these platforms came out of it is structurally flawed.
  • It’s not that technology was always going to bring about this world - techno-determinism only serves to further acquiesence to the status quo
  • It’s that technology always exists in a larger social political economic context, and its uses and possibilities are shaped by the conditions into which it emerges
  • The task ahead, now is to change these conditions. Only then will we see new possibilities emerging, socially useful technology, to help build a world that is radically more just

powered by jekyll. source on github.