The Critique of Digital Capitalism - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Critique of Digital Capitalism write by Michael Betancourt. This book was released on 2015. The Critique of Digital Capitalism available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
The Critique of Digital Capitalism: An Analysis of the Political Economy of Digital Culture and Technology
The Critique of Digital Capitalism: An Analysis of the Political Economy of Digital Culture and Technology - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Critique of Digital Capitalism: An Analysis of the Political Economy of Digital Culture and Technology write by . This book was released on . The Critique of Digital Capitalism: An Analysis of the Political Economy of Digital Culture and Technology available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Digital Capitalism
Digital Capitalism - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Digital Capitalism write by Christian Fuchs. This book was released on 2021-11-30. Digital Capitalism available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This third volume in Christian Fuchs’s Media, Communication and Society book series illuminates what it means to live in an age of digital capitalism, analysing its various aspects, and engaging with a variety of critical thinkers whose theories and approaches enable a critical understanding of digital capitalism for media and communication. Each chapter focuses on a particular dimension of digital capitalism or a critical theorist whose work helps us to illuminate how digital capitalism works. Subjects covered include: digital positivism; administrative big data analytics; the role and relations of patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the context of digital labour; digital alienation; the role of social media in the capitalist crisis; the relationship between imperialism and digital labour; alternatives such as trade unions and class struggles in the digital age; platform co-operatives; digital commons; and public service Internet platforms. It also considers specific examples, including the digital labour of Foxconn and Pegatron workers, software engineers at Google, and online freelancers, as well as considering the political economy of targeted-advertising-based Internet platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Instagram. Digital Capitalism illuminates how a digital capitalist society’s economy, politics, and culture work and interact, making it essential reading for both students and researchers in media, culture, and communication studies, as well as related disciplines.
Activism on the Web
Activism on the Web - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Activism on the Web write by Veronica Barassi. This book was released on 2015-05-22. Activism on the Web available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Activism on the Web examines the everyday tensions that political activists face as they come to terms with the increasingly commercialized nature of web technologies and sheds light on an important, yet under-investigated, dimension of the relationship between contemporary forms of social protest and internet technologies. Drawing on anthropological and ethnographic research amongst three very different political groups in the UK, Italy and Spain, the book argues that activists’ everyday internet uses are largely defined by processes of negotiation with digital capitalism. These processes of negotiation are giving rise to a series of collective experiences, which are defined by the tension between activists’ democratic needs on one side and the cultural processes reinforced by digital capitalism on the other. In looking at the encounter between activist cultures and digital capitalism, the book focuses in particular on the tension created by self-centered communication processes and networked-individualism, by corporate surveillance and data-mining, and by fast-capitalism and the temporality of immediacy. Activism on the Web suggests that if we want to understand how new technologies are affecting political participation and democratic processes, we should not focus on disruption and novelty, but we should instead explore the complex dialectics between digital discourses and digital practices; between the technical and the social; between the political economy of the web and its lived critique.
The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism
The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism write by Ben Little. This book was released on 2021-06-23. The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 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.
