Landnahme, analog und digital. Ursprüngliche Akkumulation in den Kontrollgesellschaften

Abstract

In this article, we characterise the digitisation of the lifeworld led by platform companies as digital land grabbing and look at it in the mirror of the (analogue) land grabbing described by Karl Marx as primitive accumulation. While through analogue land grabbing, a situation was violently brought about in which the workers were forced to enter into exploited wage employment or die of starvation, through digital land grabbing, a situation emerged in which one has to enter into exploited data employment (and produce data for platform companies) or die social death. Just as Silvia Federici understands analogue land grabbing as a counter-revolutionary reaction to late medieval peasant uprisings, we want to interpret digital land grabbing and the emergence of data labour as a counter-revolutionary reaction to the micropolitical liberation movements that put pressure on Fordist and post- Fordist capitalism in the 20th century.