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Article source: Innovación para el Desarrollo Sostenible. © Gobierno del Estado de Guanajuato 2018. ISBN: 978-607-8164-04-2. © UNESCO 2018. Este documento está disponible en acceso abierto bajo la licencia Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC-BY-SA 3.0 IGO). (p. 479-489)
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Electronic-computer capitalism: Economy, Academia and Politics.
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Lerma / Universidade de Brasília.
[Part 1: Introduction, Economy]
A more sophisticated understanding of intellectual cooperation and innovation calls for the understanding of great sociological, economic, political and technological forces surrounding them. In this essay, I discuss the hegemony of electronic-computer capitalism and the changes it provokes in economic, academic and political life, in order to situate in a larger context the issues and challenges we currently face. Hopefully, my arguments will be understood as a critical synthesis that aims at contributing to the debate on the cutting-edge characteristics of our times. In the social sciences, the knowledge of the world we live in is strategic in order for cooperation and innovation to take place effectively.
There are several reasons to believe that capitalism is undergoing major structural changes. The likely change of location of the world system’s center from the North Atlantic to Asia, to China, is before our eyes. After more than five centuries of Western dominance this amounts to a major civilizational change. Other changes are related to the tremendous impacts over the last three decades or so of the discovery of new commoditized resources made possible by technological developments such as those promoted by bioengineering, robotics and by what I call computer electronic-capitalism (ECC) and the related advancement of artificial intelligence. Since electronic-computer capitalism became industrial capitalism’s cutting-edge sector a new hegemony was established.1 Digitalization and the Internet have impacted all aspects of contemporary human life. Psychological, social, cultural, political and economic dynamics are affected by a strong screen fascination and the formation of a new kind of common sense that naturalizes the hegemony of the digital and online worlds with their ever more dominant (and intelligent) algorithms.
Here, I will restrict myself to describing a few of the most important features and impacts related to the hegemony of electronic-computer capitalism. I will consider new forms of value production within the Internet (the transformation of words into commodities; the bait economy; the users-workers and free massive online innovation, for instance) in order to point to the political and economic power that the leading corporations of this economic sector currently exert. I will also mention the problems that the Internet and the digital age cause to education and knowledge production. There are several political aspects generated by ECC to which we must draw attention. First, there is the capacity of private and state corporations to monitor citizens. Then, we need to consider the ideological bubble effects produced by social media that intensify the polarization of political discourses and positions. And finally, I will take into account the impacts of specific digital cunnings and statistical and psychological models over elections.
Economy
Capitalist growth, accumulation and differentiation have depended on different sources of value extraction. In this text, I will highlight two of them: the discovery of new universes of commodification and the exploitation of free labor and knowledge. I will focus mainly on Google and Facebook, the third and fifth largest companies by market capitalization in the world (Taplin 2017). They are also the most visible faces (no pun intended) of the hegemony of electronic-computer capitalism. I will start by highlighting the economic aspects of this hegemony because they are the drivers of ECC’s ramifications in almost all aspects of contemporary life.
The main source of Google’s economic power has been its search engine. Words were transformed into commodities by search engines on the Internet. When someone googles a word and the search result appears on the screen, she or he doesn’t know that the ranking s/he sees is economically structured. The hierarchical order is auctioned and bidders buy visibility and priority. An expression such as “word mining” currently exists because there is a market place for keywords and words have differentiated prices and classificatory power according to their frequency and to the economic power behind them. Hotel or Paris, for instance, are highly valuable words since they may be of interest to travel agencies, airlines and travelers. Firms operating in the tourism business want to be the first placed on a list that may have thousands of millions of other items that were found associated with the two words.
In fact, the commodification of words is not entirely new. Words, or better saying, sets of words threaded in a literary form were the object of the first copyright laws (Johns 2009) since their composition was intrinsically linked to a unique creation, a capacity of inventiveness, an authorship. However, currently, the search engines reveal that any word, capable of being associated with commodities or services, has a value. The price of the words today is discarnate of its literary form, it does not suppose any longer a literary creation. Words were really fetichized. To sell them, we no longer need the author, the writer-creator. Single words, such as the above mentioned hotel or Paris, may have a price. The price of the words that existed before under the form of literary creation has narrowed to the price of the word transformed into a sign of negotiable capitalist goods and services. Electronic-computer capitalism created a new commodity and the means to exploit this resource in a variety of languages. By transforming words into searchable signs, Google brought into being the word market and turned it into a world market. At the same time, it concentrated, in its own headquarter, the capacity to see what is happening in the world (and in the economy) and what are people’s and corporations’ interests, developing for itself an electronic panopitcon of the market. It also made the global market instantaneously searchable, and potentially available for every user. It thus fostered the virtual global market populated by users and not consumers. If users were called consumers the unequal relationship between corporations and their clients would become explicit, i.e. consumers are obviously buying something while here they receive a service, apparently for free.
The bait economy (users as unpaid labor), crowdsourcing and Googleism
Besides the strong fascination computer’s and smartphone’s screens exerts, with the connectivity they allow and that creates surrogate virtual social worlds, there is another quality of on-line services such as Google and Facebook that exert a great attraction: they are given or available without charge. Indeed, people believe they are using it for free, that is, without having to give anything valuable in return. However, besides ignoring the point that words have prices, that we are in a new age of the advertising industry that is highly maximized by the internet, users also ignore the point that they themselves and the information they provide are the commodities sold by Google and by other powerful electronic-computer corporations such as Facebook. The false idea that someone is getting a sophisticated and much needed service for free underlies what I call the “bait economy,” meaning that you are offered an irresistible gift but, once you are literally linked into it, you give in return a precious good: all the information corporations need to tailor to your taste the consumer goods and services they want to sell. Once you are hooked to these systems, you enter the bait economy and most likely will never leave it. The many billions of people using these systems around the world leave digital traces of their consumption patterns and tastes and thus become the greatest assets the corporations have. Corporations sell the information they get without users knowing it and rely on ads to make profits. The value an advertiser pays “depends only on how many people click on” its ad (Jarvis, 2011: 68)2. On the other hand, when you click on an ad you are working for these corporations. Users are thus both commodities that are sold in large aggregates and workers that are exploited in huge numbers. This is why I’d rather call them users-workers. Again, electronic-computer capitalism has untapped a huge, globally dispersed labor force, people who, besides ignoring the existence of their peers, are mostly unaware that their labor is a major source of wealth for the owners of electronic-computer capitalism’s means of production.
Electronic-computer capitalism has struck another rich vein. Ideas, the source of invention, innovation and differentiation, are easily found for free or for a comparatively much lower price on the internet. Today capitalists may have access to a mega global brain that is disseminated in the fragmented global spaces and that generates creativity at an unprecedented scale and speed3. Corporations may save the expensive costs of their research and development departments, with their many engineers and scientists, by outsourcing to the virtual multitude their needs to innovate, to solve specific problems or to find new processes, contents, services, technologies and merchandises (Bueno 2016). Crowdsourcing is the buzzword that names this move. It literally means “outsourcing for the crowd: a production model that uses the intelligence and the collective and voluntary knowledge spread throughout the Internet” (Moulier Boutang, 2010, p. 75). Inventions and innovations are powerful drivers of capitalist differentiation and growth. Once more, electronic-computer capitalists have found new globally and virtually dispersed sources of value they can use for their benefit. Interestingly enough, the Free Software Movement, with its ideas of technical virtual disinterested cooperation for the global common good, unintentionally opened the way for the development of crowdsourcing.
The history of industrial capitalism is often presented as a sequence of modes of organizing and managing factors of production in order to achieve greater rationality in the processes of production and increase of profit making. Taylorism was a major step in this transformation of the labor process and managerial culture as were Fordism and Toyotism. Most of the time these managerial innovations imply the appropriation of preexisting technical knowledge by supposedly prescient elites that present them as an economic, political and social revolution. They thus become models, i.e. a “codification of paradigms that come to light in advanced industrialized countries” (Bueno, 2016: 34), centers from which they disseminate on an international level. For me, Googleism is the new fad of the entrepreneurial world.
Indeed, Google not only inspires business and profit-making models, it is also a model of new labor relations and managerial culture. Management consultant Bernard Girard (2009) wrote a book comparing Google to the roles Ford and Toyota played in the history of industrial management, to show that the corporation is a “management model for the knowledge economy” (Girard, 2009, p.3).4 He states that calling Google’s new management model revolutionary “is not an exaggeration” (Girard, 2009, p.223):
This revolution also has a social dimension. Rarely has any enterprise relied as much as Google on the “voluntary capital” of its workers, their contacts, and their relationships to test new products or to garner new ideas and enhance products. Undoubtedly, Google is the first company to have figured out how to benefit from the development of fan communities comprised not only of evangelists but also of observers and pitiless critics (Google’s most effective information sources precisely because their criticism is so severe) (Girard, 2009, p. 224).
1 For a complete rendering on the economic aspects of electronic-computer capitalism’s hegemony see Lins Ribeiro (2018). The next section of this chapter is heavily based on it.
2 In 2012, Google derived 96% of its revenues from ads (McFarlane, 2012).
3 The idea of a world brain goes back at least to H.G. Wells who, in 1938, published a book with this title. He described it in ways that are similar to what the internet is today, although, his conception stressed the multiplicity and universality of the information available to everyone but did not stress the possibility of multiple deterritorialized interactions (Wells 1938). To a general view on different conceptions of a “global brain” see Heylighen (2011).
4 For a discussion on the transition from Fordism to Toyotism and the international dissemination of the latter, see Bueno (2016, pp. 137-162).
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