My notes on Morozov, E. (2019) Digital Socialism? The Calculation Debate in the Age of Big Data. New Left Review 116/117, 33-66 A range of terms have entered circulation in recent years which suggest a transformation in capitalism. Digital capitalism, platform capitalism, data capitalism and surveillance capitalism point to a shift which is significant in […]
Tag: digital capitalism
This is superb from Richard Seymour on the ceaseless demands which contemporary capitalism places on us and the psychic costs they create. I’ve found his idea of the Twittering machine incredibly thought provoking to make sense of the sprawling entity which social media platforms are tangling us up within: One of the most exhausting features […]
Notes for week 1 of the CPGJ Platform Capitalism reading group. The notes below relate to Evgeny Morozov’s lecture below: The question of ‘who owns digital capitalism?’ was posed for the conference but it was one which Morozov felt uncomfortable with because it implied a separation between ‘digital capitalism’ and financialised capitalism. To illustrate the […]
I thought this was really interesting, particularly the focus on HCI for this strategy: *HCI/UX researchers at Google’s Next Billion Users teamThe Google Next Billion Users team is looking for HCI interns, post-docs, and researchers-on-contract to work on exploratory research and product initiatives. The team builds global products from the ground-up with new Internet users, […]
One of the most pressing issues we confront when analysing the digital economy is a pronounced tendency towards oligopoly which makes a lie of an earlier generation’s utopian embrace of the Internet as a sphere of free competition and a driver of disintermediation. There are important lessons we can learn from platform studies about the […]
Reluctantly cut from my digital sociology paper Indeed, as Srnicek (2016) argues, this dynamics is integral to the nature of the platform itself, as a business model premised upon maximising opportunities for data extraction through situating itself as an intermediary between the interactions of existing actors. Each platform has an epistemic privilege in relation to […]
In my copy of The Vocation Lectures, edited by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, the editors helpfully annotate Weber’s description of the occupational realities of the German academic. From pg 2: German students used to have a Studienbuch, a notebook in which they registered the coruses they were taking in their field. They then had […]
As some reading this may be aware, I’m fairly critical of the account Giddens gives of late modernity, seeing it as a wrong-turning for many qualitative researchers who sought to situate their findings in a socio-historical context. Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking recently about the concept of the disembedding mechanism and how it might allow us to theorising […]
In Platform Capitalism, Nick Srnicek seeks to address what he sees as a profound oversight in the existing literature on digital capitalism. One set of contributions focuses on emerging technologies and their implications for privacy and surveillance but ignores the economic analysis of ownership and profitability. Another set critically analyses the values embodied in corporate behaviour but […]
There’s an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the threat index funds are increasingly seen to pose to the global economy. I’d like to understand this more than I do because I’m intrigued by the technological preconditions for this form of investing and the competitive advantage this use of technology offers: And a group of researchers […]
From The Data Revolution by Rob Kitchin, loc 566-580: Moreover, data constitute an economic resource, one that is a key component of the next phase of the knowledge economy, reshaping the mode of production to one that it is data-driven (see Chapter 7). Since the late 1980s, scholars such as Castells (1988, 1996) have argued […]
From Alan Jacobs (Via Audrey Watters): The megatech companies’ ability to convince us that they are not Big Business but rather just open-minded, open-hearted, exploratory technological creators is perhaps the most powerful and influential — and radically misleading — sales jobs of the past 25 years. The Californian ideology has become our ideology. Which means […]
From Rise of the Robots, by Martin Ford, loc 1053-1069: Virtually all of the financial innovations that have arisen in recent decades—including, for example, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and exotic financial derivatives—would not have been possible without access to powerful computers. Likewise, automated trading algorithms are now responsible for nearly two-thirds of stock market trades, […]
Two interesting things I read yesterday which are feeding into my short article on digital capitalism and digital social science: The radical potential of the Digital Humanities: The most challenging computing problem is the interrogation of power Fill in the Gap. A New Alliance for Social and Natural Sciences I’m interested in how a range of […]
Really interesting looking conference organised by Chris Till: Digital Health/Digital Capitalism One Day Conference CfP 4th July 2016 Digital technologies have had a profound impact on the ways in which people live their lives, relate to one another and think about themselves and their capacities. This event will bring together scholars who are interested in […]
Notes for a talk I’m doing at this event tomorrow An obvious place to start is with what I take ‘images of the human’ to be and what I take ‘digital social science’ to be. Images of the human are fairly straight forward. I mean everything from the most explicit claims about human properties and powers to […]
I’m just finishing off this Frank Pasquale paper I began reading yesterday. I really can’t recommend it enough. I particularly liked this passage on what I’m describing as the kind of digital social science that digital capitalism is encouraging: There is something even more disturbing than the lack of consent here: namely, the easy hybridization […]
I’ve just published a great piece on The Sociological Review blog, by Sage’s Ziyad Marar, which really resonates with some of the concerns shaping my new project: Yet our digital culture may exacerbate this problem by tilting us even further toward speed, simplicity and utility. In what is often called the ‘attention economy’ (where information […]
As we enter the second machine age, it’s easy to assume that coding skills will be in ever increasing demand. But this TechCrunch feature suggests both that the skills shortage will likely prove fleeting, due to the impending automation of much coding, as well as that bullshit abounds in schemes which aim to address the […]
From The Big Short by Michael Lewis, pg 172. This is a part of the story of the financial crisis which has received too little attention: ‘innovations’ in finance were driven by the ‘disruption’ the established figures in the industry were subject to as a result of new online competitors: One of the reasons Wall […]
