Beyond Digital Capitalism

Author : Leo Panitch,Greg Albo
Publisher : Monthly Review Press
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2020-12-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781583678831

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Beyond Digital Capitalism: New Ways of Living by Leo Panitch,Greg Albo Pdf

Essays that explore new ways of living with technological change Every year since 1964, the Socialist Register has offered a fascinating survey of movements and ideas from the independent new left. This year's edition asks readers to explore just how we need to live with new technologies. Essays in this 57th Socialist Register reveal the contradictions and dislocations of technological change in the twenty-first century. And they explore alternative ways of living: from artificial intelligence (AI) to the arts, from transportation to fashion, from environmental science to economic planning. Greg Albo - Post-capitalism: Alternatives or detours? Nicole Aschoff and Pankaj Mahta - AI-deology: Science, capitalism and the dream of a ‘people’s AI’ Hugo Radice - There is nothing artificial about AI: Labour, class, utopia, socialism Larry Lohman - Interpretation machines: Contradictions of digital mechanization in twenty-first century capitalism Robin Hahnel - Democratic socialist planning: Against, with and beyond the new technologies Tanner Mirrlees - Platform socialists in the age of digital capitalism Derek Hrynyshyn – Imagining information socialism Bryan Palmer - Capitalism and the clock: Time’s meaning in the struggle for socialism Sean Sweeney and John Treat - Shifting gears: Labour strategies for low-carbon public transit mobility Adam Greenfield - Smart cities, technological traps, democratic possibilities Christoph Hermann - The consequences of commodification: Contours of a post-capitalist society Joan Sangster – The surveillance of service labour: Conditions and possibilities of resistance Jeronimo Montero Bressan - Beyond neoliberal fashion: Imagining clothing production as a human need Massimiliano Mollona - Art/Commons: Art collectives and the post-capitalist imagination Ingar Solty – The world of tomorrow: Scenarios for our future between demise and hope

Author : Leo Panitch,Gregory Albo
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Capitalism
ISBN : 1773632973

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Beyond Digital Capitalism by Leo Panitch,Gregory Albo Pdf

"How to live with the new technologies? Essays in the fifty-seventh Socialist Register reveal the contradictions and dislocations of technological change in the twenty-first century. And they explore alternative ways of living: from AI to the arts, from transportation to fashion, from environmental science to economic planning." --Amazon.ca.

Author : Michael Betancourt
Publisher : punctum books
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780692598443

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The Critique of Digital Capitalism by Michael Betancourt Pdf

Anything that can be automated, will be. The "magic" that digital technology has brought us - self-driving cars, Bitcoin, high frequency trading, the internet of things, social networking, mass surveillance, the 2009 housing bubble - has not been considered from an ideological perspective. The Critique of Digital Capitalism identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities, and also describes digital capitalism as an ideologically "invisible" framework that is realized in technology. Written as a series of articles between 2003 and 2015, the book provides a broad critical scope for understanding the inherent demands of capitalist protocols for expansion without constraint (regardless of social, legal or ethical limits) that are increasingly being realized as autonomous systems that are no longer dependent on human labor or oversight and implemented without social discussion of their impacts. The digital illusion of infinite resources, infinite production, and no costs appears as an "end to scarcity," whereby digital production supposedly eliminates costs and makes everything equally available to everyone. This fantasy of production without consumption hides the physical costs and real-world impacts of these technologies. The critique introduced in this book develops from basic questions about how digital technologies directly change the structure of society: why is "Digital Rights Management" not only the dominant "solution" for distributing digital information, but also the only option being considered? During the burst of the "Housing Bubble" burst 2009, why were the immaterial commodities being traded of primary concern, but the actual physical assets and the impacts on the people living in them generally ignored? How do surveillance (pervasive monitoring) and agnotology (culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data) coincide as mutually reinforcing technologies of control and restraint? If technology makes the assumptions of its society manifest as instrumentality - then what ideology is being realized in the form of the digital computer? This final question animates the critical framework this analysis proposes. Digital capitalism is a dramatically new configuration of the historical dynamics of production, labor and consumption that results in a new variant of historical capitalism. This contemporary, globalized network of production and distribution depends on digital capitalism's refusal of established social restraints: existing laws are an impediment to the transcendent aspects of digital technology. Its utopian claims mask its authoritarian result: the superficial "objectivity" of computer systems are supposed to replace established protections with machinic function - the uniform imposition of whatever ideology informs the design. However, machines are never impartial: they reify the ideologies they are built to enact. The critical analysis of capitalist ideologies as they become digital is essential to challenging this process. Contesting their domination depends on theoretical analysis. This critique challenges received ideas about the relationship between labor, commodity production and value, in the process demonstrating how the historical Marxist analysis depends on assumptions that are no longer valid. This book therefore provides a unique, critical toolset for the analysis of digital capitalist hegemonics.

Author : Dan Schiller
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0262692333

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Digital Capitalism by Dan Schiller Pdf

Schiller explores how corporate domination is changing the political and social underpinnings of the Internet. He argues that the market driven policies which govern the Internet are exacerbating existing social inequalities.

Author : Jenny Huberman
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 140 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2022-09-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781509553976

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The Spirit of Digital Capitalism by Jenny Huberman Pdf

Digital technologies are now central to the machinations of capitalism. How are they giving rise to new forms of capital accumulation and domination? And in what terms are these changes being promoted and justified by a new and incredibly powerful elite? This book takes on such questions. Beyond demonstrating how digital technologies make new forms of capital accumulation possible, Huberman interrogates the ideological transformations that have accompanied the emergence of digital capitalism. She examines how business gurus, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists make claims about how digital technologies contribute to the common good, foster collaboration and connectivity, and render life more convenient, even if this convenience comes at the expense of values such as privacy and liberty. Ultimately, Huberman argues that the spirit of digital capitalism is Janus-faced and reveals deeper cultural contradictions at the heart of contemporary American society: promising, in the same moment, to liberate us and surveil us, enrich us, and yet render our lives more economically precarious. Smart and thought-provoking, this book offers new perspectives that will speak to anyone interested in the contours of contemporary capitalism, particularly students and scholars of economic anthropology and sociology.

Author : David Chandler,Christian Fuchs
Publisher : University of Westminster Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2019-01-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781912656097

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Digital Objects, Digital Subjects by David Chandler,Christian Fuchs Pdf

This volume explores activism, research and critique in the age of digital subjects and objects and Big Data capitalism after a digital turn said to have radically transformed our political futures. Optimists assert that the ‘digital’ promises: new forms of community and ways of knowing and sensing, innovation, participatory culture, networked activism, and distributed democracy. Pessimists argue that digital technologies have extended domination via new forms of control, networked authoritarianism and exploitation, dehumanization and the surveillance society. Leading international scholars present varied interdisciplinary assessments of such claims – in theory and via dialogue – and of the digital’s impact on society and the potentials, pitfalls, limits and ideologies, of digital activism. They reflect on whether computational social science, digital humanities and ubiquitous datafication lead to digital positivism that threatens critical research or lead to new horizons in theory and society. An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. More information about the initiative and details about KU’s Open Access programme can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org.

Author : Jonathan Crary
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 140 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2022-04-12
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781784784454

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Scorched Earth by Jonathan Crary Pdf

Selected as one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022 Finalist for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction In this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our 'digital age' is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialization of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support. This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be instruments of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.

Author : Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 658 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2019-01-15
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9781610395700

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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff Pdf

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Author : Greg Albo,Leo Panitch
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2019-12-23
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781583678442

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Beyond Market Dystopia: New Ways of Living by Greg Albo,Leo Panitch Pdf

Essays which aim to create a world of agency and justice How can we build a future with better health and homes, respecting people and the environment? The 2020 edition of the Socialist Register, Beyond Market Dystopia, contains a wealth of incisive essays that entice readers to do just that: to wake up to the cynical, implicitly market-driven concept of human society we have come to accept as everyday reality. Intellectuals and activists such as Michelle Chin, Nancy Fraser, Arun Gupta, and Jeremy Brecher connect with and go beyond classical socialist themes, to combine an analysis of how we are living now with visions and plans for new strategic, programmatic, manifesto-oriented alternative ways of living.

Author : Hannah Cross
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2020-09-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781509535965

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Migration Beyond Capitalism by Hannah Cross Pdf

Harshly exploited migrant labour plays a fundamental role in the political economy of contemporary capitalism. The abstract and utopian theorising of many liberals and leftists on the migration question often ignores or downplays patterns of displacement and brutal class dynamics, which divide and weaken working people while empowering the ruling class. In this important new book, Hannah Cross provides a sober analysis of the class antagonisms of migration in the context of the nation, social democracy, and the racialized ordering of the world. Bringing Marxist methodology and strategy to a careful analysis of existing emancipatory movements, she sets out the programmes and approaches that are needed to promote global worker solidarity and create a future in which cheap labour is no longer a mainstay of wealthy economies. This focus on the labouring classes allows her to identify some important new directions for migration in a world beyond capitalism, exploitation and injustice. This book will be essential reading for students, scholars and general readers interested in the politics and political economy of migration in a world unhelpfully caught between racist authoritarian capitalism and the wishful-thinking of contemporary left-liberalism.

Author : Judy Wajcman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2016-07-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780226380841

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Pressed for Time by Judy Wajcman Pdf

In Pressed for Time, Judy Wajcman explains why we immediately interpret our experiences with digital technology as inexorably accelerating everyday life. She argues that we are not mere hostages to communication devices, and the sense of always being rushed is the result of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set rather than the machines that help us set them."--Jacket.

Author : Robert W. McChesney
Publisher : New Press, The
Page : 319 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2013-03-05
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9781595588913

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Digital Disconnect by Robert W. McChesney Pdf

Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world. McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect McChesney returns to this provocative thesis in light of the advances of the digital age, incorporating capitalism into the heart of his analysis. He argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems, and other policies and massive indirect subsidies have made the Internet a place of numbing commercialism. A small handful of monopolies now dominate the political economy, from Google, which garners an astonishing 97 percent share of the mobile search market, to Microsoft, whose operating system is used by over 90 percent of the world's computers. This capitalistic colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism, and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance, and a disturbingly anti-democratic force. In Digital Disconnect Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking analysis and critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.

Author : Ben Little,Alison Winch
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2021-06-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000397635

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The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism by Ben Little,Alison Winch Pdf

This book offers an original critique of the billionaire founders of US West Coast tech companies, addressing their collective power, influence, and ideology, their group dynamics, and the role they play in the wider sociocultural and political formations of digital capitalism. Interrogating not only the founders’ political and economic ambitions, but also how their corporations are omnipresent in our everyday lives, the authors provide robust evidence that a specific kind of patriarchal power has emerged as digital capitalism’s mode of command. The ‘New Patriarchs’ examined over the course of the book include: Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Peter Thiel. We also include Sheryl Sandberg. The book analyses how these (mostly) men legitimate their rapidly acquired power, tying a novel kind of socially awkward but ‘visionary’ masculinity to exotic forms of shareholding. Drawing on a ten million word digital concordance, the authors intervene in feminist debates on patriarchy, masculinity, and postfeminism, locating the power of the founders as emanating from a specifically racialised structure of oppression tied to imaginaries of the American frontier, the patriarchal household, and settler colonialism. This is an important interdisciplinary contribution suitable for researchers and students across Digital Media, Media and Communication, and Gender and Cultural Studies.

Author : Jenny Huberman
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2022-09-29
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1509553959

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The Spirit of Digital Capitalism by Jenny Huberman Pdf

Author : Alexander J. Means
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 2018-04-09
Category : Education
ISBN : 9781315450186

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Learning to Save the Future by Alexander J. Means Pdf

Mainstream economists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs claim that unfettered capitalism and digital technology can unlock a future of unbounded prosperity, create endless high paying jobs, and solve the world’s vast social and ecological problems. Realizing this future of abundance purportedly rests in the transformation of human potential into innovative human capital through new 21st century forms of education. In this new book Alex Means challenges this view. Stagnating economic growth and runaway inequality have emerged as the ‘normal’ condition of advanced capitalism. Simultaneously, there has been a worldwide educational expansion and a growing surplus of college-educated workers relative to their demand in the world economy. This surplus is complicated by an emerging digital revolution driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning that generates worker displacing innovations and immaterial forms of labor and valorization. Learning to Save the Future argues that rather than fostering mass intellectuality, educational development is being constrained by a value structure subordinated to 21st century capitalism and technology. Human capabilities from creativity, design, engineering, to communication are conceived narrowly as human capital, valued in terms of economic productivity and growth. Similarly, global problems such as the erosion of employment and climate change are conceived as educational problems to be addressed through business solutions and the digitalization of education. This thought-provoking account provides a cognitive map of this condition, offering alternatives through critical analyses of education and political economy, technology and labor, creativity and value, power and ecology.