Digital Capitalism Research Articles

Harvesting value: Corporate strategies of data assetization in agriculture and their socio-ecological implications

The global food system is characterized by market concentration and oligopoly. In our article, we focus on the most powerful input supply and machinery companies and analyze how these firms create value, both economic and otherwise, from big data. In digital capitalism, data is valorized across sectors; personal data is aggregated into large-scale datasets, a practice that feeds economic concentration and monopolization. Big data also has become central to the business model for agricultural companies; it is a claim made by the companies themselves. Yet, little is known about their specific strategies to do so. We aim to fill this gap, asking how is agricultural data transformed into value by the most powerful agribusinesses and ag-tech firms? Through the lens of assetization, we examine corporate strategies for transforming agricultural data into value. We draw on literature from food studies, specifically political economic analyses of the historical practices of agricultural corporations, as well as literature from critical data studies that investigates data as an asset. For our analysis, we rely on a variety of gray literature and public-facing documents: financial documents, sustainability and shareholder reports, terms of use, license agreements, and news articles. Our results contribute to the critical data studies literature on agricultural big data by identifying three main strategies of assetization: securing relationships and dependence, price-setting and data sharing, and product development and targeted marketing. The strategies have socio-ecological implications; our results indicate the reproduction of asymmetrical power relations in the agri-food system favoring corporations and the continuation of long-standing dynamics of inequalities.

Communicative Activity: Social Theoretical Foundations for Critical Materialist Media and Communication Sociology in the Digital Age

This paper contributes to the social theoretical foundations of a sociology of media and communication by making use of the cultural–historical school in psychology. Such perspective gains relevance in digital capitalism and the blurring of production and Internet usage. The paper first revisits Habermas’s influential notion of communicative action and agency. Second, it uses activity theory as an alternative, more promising way of theorising because it links communication closer to work. A model of communicative action is introduced and a conceptual link between media and human tool use is established. Third, the paper elaborates on the notion of activity in the digital world and posits that digitalisation can be understood as a ‘machinisation’ of mental and communicative-coordinative work. The developed perspective, the paper concludes, allows critical media and communication sociology to operate with meaningful concepts of communicative expropriation, exploitation and alienation.

‘You can book an interpreter the same way you order your Uber': (re)interpreting work and digital labour platforms

ABSTRACT The gig economy, encompassing on-demand work via platforms, has grown exponentially with significant consequences for the interpreting industry. Arguing that this tendency of the interpreting industry towards gig work reflects wider shifts in both labour-capital relations and the role of technology in the economy, this study explores ‘gig’ interpreting work from a labour process theory perspective. Leveraging a qualitative case study of three platforms in Northwestern Europe, as well as interviews with platform companies’ managers and interpreters, the study indicates that platformisation is impacting business models, organisation, and intermediation of interpreting work, with implications for interpreters’ working conditions. The study finds that engaging in platform work exposes interpreters to risks related to monetary factors, algorithmic control, individualisation of employment relations, on-demand availability, and subjugation to a digital form of supply-demand intermediation. In contrast, platform companies push towards maximising interests of profit and flexibility, harnessing the potential of gig work as the natural, entrepreneurial extension of interpreters’ self-employment status. The study contributes to interpreting and sociological studies on workplace developments in digital capitalism, suggesting that the configuration of interpreting in platform-mediated production lubricates an exploitative labour-capital relationship.

От метода к предмету

The article addresses the problems of the methodology of artistic research, which is seen as the production of a specific form of knowledge related to aesthetic experience. The field of artistic research emerges in the last decades of the 20th century as a result of the convergence of the art world and the academy under the influence of conceptual art and the interdisciplinary turn. Research appears as a methodological bricolage in which the aesthetic is no longer displaced in opposition to the cognitive, but rather complements it. The importance of aesthetic knowledge production increases in the situation of revision of the linguistic paradigm. The factors of multiplicity, complexity and uncertainty are beginning to play a key role in how the subject of research reveals itself: it is becoming less and less predictable and understandable from a linguistic perspective. Its limitations are overcome by shifting the focus of attention from the research method to the subject. Actor-network theory and its philosophical implications are a natural ally here. By rediscovering the subject as an activated non-self-identity, a network-centered quasi-subjectivity, the research methodology acquires similarities with the strategy that Karen Barad calls ethico-onto-epistemology. Artistic research turns out to be a territory where scenarios of response to the crisis of imagination provoked by digital capitalism are produced. This makes the field of artistic research part of a broad process of experimental cultural production and thought that can be called a permanent cognitive revolution.

Digital Capitalism and Distributive Forces (excerpt)

Digital Capitalism and Distributive Forces (excerpt)

Technofeudalism or Technosocialism? WeChat as Socialist Alternative to Platform Capitalism

The emergence of Chinese platform technology, WeChat (微信) an application that singularly incorporates functions of messaging, social media, financial services and more, marks a new development in the construction of Chinese socialism and the Chi- nese nation-building project. What then of the Western critiques of platform tech- nology and their interaction with political economy: technofeudalism and platform capitalism? This article argues that these analyses which successfully critique the way Big Tech platforms have manifested as technologies for capitalist extraction in the West do not accurately account for the function of WeChat in China's system of socialist de- velopment. Notably, both platform capitalism and technofeudalism presuppose that platform technologies emerge out of neoliberalism. Arguing that WeChat's advance- ment and success is partly attributed to China's rejection of neoliberal austerity politics and policy, this article looks to WeChat as a potential alternative to Western modes of digital capitalism.

Les cryptoactifs, innovations sociales et institution

This article proposes to analyze cryptoassets as social innovations through their capacity to respond to new polymorphic needs and to transform the structuring institutions of the economic system. The framework of the School of Regulation defines five structural forms: money, competition, the wage relation, the state and the international order. The institution originally targeted by cryptoassets is money, responding to new needs (aspiration to currencies freed from states and banks, search for anonymity, ease for international transfers and credible alternative to the dollar). Cryptoassets also satisfy the new needs arising from global digital capitalism (the creation of communities, the valuation of digital goods and services, the co-production of services through the network).

Development in Digital Capitalism: Challenges and Prospects of Nepal

This study delves into the challenges and possibilities surrounding the establishment of digital capitalism in Nepal. Utilizing a secondary data analysis methodology, it examines the current state of digital capitalism in the country and identifies the key obstacles and opportunities. The theoretical framework employed incorporates concepts like transnational informational capitalism, digital governance, and actor-network theory to comprehend the dynamic relationship between labor, technology, and capitalism in the digital era. The findings indicate that while Nepal has witnessed growth in internet penetration and mobile phone usage, there are still significant disparities in digital access and infrastructure between urban and rural areas. The challenges faced include inadequate digital infrastructure, limited consumer trust and awareness, and the need for more robust regulatory frameworks. Nevertheless, Nepal also holds promising prospects for digital capitalism. The increasing availability of smart-phones a techno-literate youth population, and government initiatives aimed at promoting digital literacy and entrepreneurship contribute to the country's potential in this area. The study underscores the significance of digital capitalism for Nepal's economic development and provides recommendations to policymakers, entrepreneurs, and researchers on how to foster an environment that facilitates the growth of digital capitalism. By addressing the challenges of digital infrastructure, building consumer trust, and strengthening regulatory frameworks, Nepal can harness the benefits of digital capitalism, leveraging it as a catalyst for economic progress in the country.

Foreword to the thematic issue on cities in global capitalism

This thematic issue investigates the complex interactions between urban environments and global capitalism. It includes a range of case studies and theoretical analyses that delve into the effects of global economic forces on urban spaces. The papers explore various topics, such as the transformation of labor markets due to digital capitalism, the impact of economic activities on urban climate resilience, and the challenges of sustainable urban development. The issue highlights the necessity of interdisciplinary approaches to understand and address the dynamic relationship between urban geographies and global economic systems.

ChatGPT and digital capitalism: need for an antidote of Competition Law

ChatGPT and digital capitalism: need for an antidote of Competition Law

Digital leap in the New Mexican school since the pandemic lockdown: Challenges for governance and pedagogical processes

This paper analyzes the extent to which the use of digital education platforms (DEP), which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, has modified educational policies for digital transition in schools in the context of the last Mexican educational reform (2019), teaching-learning processes, and school-family relations. Our main hypothesis is that the digital leap, in the New Mexican School that emerged from the last educational reform, has considerably modified the methods of educational governance, the pedagogical processes in schooling, and the ways of communication between schools and families, with implications for children’s rights. The objective is to identify, from the stakeholders’ perspectives, the effects of the growing importance of BigTech corporations in Mexico and of the expansion of digital capitalism, which deepened as an effect of school closures due to the pandemic, and to analyze the results from the gender perspective. The research methodology is qualitative based on in-depth interviews with policymakers and a survey of 70 school principals, teachers, and families from the five educational regions of the country. Our main research objective is to explore the perceptions, experiences, and opinions of women and men in urban and rural environments about the changes experienced since the pandemic in terms of digital transition and to identify the benefits and constraints of using DEP in schooling contexts.

Comparative digital protest cultures in South Africa and Tamil Nadu: #feesmustfall, #Jallikattu, and Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) - a case of surveillance and diasporic potential

This paper explores three protest movements differing in scale and scope in two regions in the world. #feesmustfall (2015-2016) was a social media movement in South Africa to protest against prohibitive hikes in university fees. #Jallikattu (2017) was a social media movement in Tamil Nadu (India) to lift a ban imposed by the Supreme Court of India against an ancient cultural sport with bulls. Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM) is a South African social media movement to raise issues related to shack dwellers. While there is literature focusing on these movements individually (Bosch 2016, Kalaiyarasan 2017, Mdlalose 2014), a comparative approach offers some alternate insights into how state power manifests in the age of digital capitalism. Habermas (1987, 1989) theorised the transformation of the public sphere and key to understanding how these publics contest existing power structures is his explication of authentic communicative action. Using Fuchs’s (2016) and Zuboff’s (2019) analyses of social media activism, we examine police brutality and surveillance in these three movements. The classical model of diaspora (Harutyunyan 2012) is introduced to show how it manifests in two of the protest movements, and contemporary notions of diaspora (Grossman 2019: 1265) are explored to see what they could offer to diverse protest cultures.

Digital Humanities—Ways Forward; Future Challenges

Abstract Have digital tools and methods accelerated the rate of scholarly production over the last 20 years? If so, has this acceleration been beneficial for scholarship? This article considers examples of accelerated historical scholarship as well as calls for a “slow history.” Through an analysis of the author's own experiences with the digital humanities, it examines the advantages and disadvantages of digital technologies in the field of history. It concludes that online resources and digital technologies have expanded the archive for the historian and created new ways to reach other specialists and the general public. Nevertheless, historical scholarship must still rely on carefully crafted, well-argued prose whose production cannot be accelerated by new digital technologies, although recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence may ultimately challenge this situation. In recent decades, the field (or, at times, discipline) of digital humanities (DH) has revolutionized the scholarly profession and beyond—and with good reason. Seen at times as a democratizing force, DH has led to the creation of an increasing number of open- access databases and scholarly publications, the launching of massive archival digitization initiatives, and the development of numerous digital tools that help streamline the work of the academic researcher, student, and educator. In many ways, then, its benefits are manifest. Yet, recent years have also begun to reveal numerous problems that could influence various aspects of our trade as well as what—and how—information will be available in the future. This article discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of DH and invites the reader to reflect on what we can do to help mitigate these problems. Exciting new modes of digital scholarship have emerged in recent years, providing us with expanded windows onto the past. This process has been accelerated by somewhat democratized ways of digitizing and analyzing source material. A main issue of contemporary knowledge production using digitized sources is how power can so easily be reinscribed into access to archives. The choice to digitize collections, even the existence of collections themselves, creates a great opportunity for research but also runs the risk of reinforcing the privilege and worldviews that have shaped and continue to shape the very processes of digitization and digitalization. Drawing on examples of Western and non-Western digital scholarship, this article argues that, although the digital facilitates greater public knowledge of collections, when it comes to decolonizing our research subjects, it also introduces significant layers of complexity. This article advances an analysis of the development and state of critical digital humanities. It posits two modalities for this approach to digital humanities (DH). The first is a modality of inward-looking, functional self-critique that comprises a rethinking of computational genesis stories, logics and methods, institutions and infrastructures, and digital capitalism, and the second is an outward-looking critique best understood as a form of situated sociopolitical engagement that embraces epistemic and social justice projects that are decolonial, anti-racist, inclusive, collaborative, and multilingual. Through these analyses, the article offers a vision of critical digital humanities in its mission to critique the ideologies, social inequities, and epistemological hierarchies that are built into technological products and computational logics and that are concomitantly fostered by knowledge- creation industries of universities, corporations, governments, and the GLAM[R] sector. In this way, the article shows how critical digital humanities helps us to envision the role that DH can play in processes of recovery, reparations, emancipation, and community-building. Drawing upon over 20 years as Editor-in-Chief of H-France, I argue that the scholarly profession, established in Cold War era, pre-digital institutions, has only begun to adapt to the transformations introduced by the global digital humanities. A generational shift is currently underway as younger scholars more natively adept with digital technologies use their skills and forms of new media to press for changes in hiring and tenure practices, to demand greater progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues, and to insist that the academy confront the collapse of academic positions in the humanities and provide training for and recognition of alternative career paths. I call upon professional organizations to undertake difficult conversations and take leadership in reshaping professional organizations for a post–Cold War, digital age, especially in terms of funding priorities. Scholarly organizations will best gain influence through collaboration.

Totally Administered Heteronomy: Adorno on Work, Leisure, and Politics in the Age of Digital Capitalism

This paper aims to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Adorno’s thought for business ethicists working in the critical tradition by showing how his critique of modern social life anticipated, and offers continuing illumination of, recent technological transformations of capitalism. It develops and extrapolates Adorno’s thought regarding three central spheres of modern society, which have seen radical changes in light of recent technological developments: work, in which employee monitoring has become ever more sophisticated and intrusive; leisure consumption, in which the algorithmic developments of the culture industry have paved the way for entertainment products to dominate us; and political discourse, in which social media has exacerbated the anti-democratic tendencies Adorno warned of in the mid-twentieth century. We conclude by presenting, as a rejoinder to these developments, the contours of an Adornian ethics of resistance to the reification and dehumanisation of such developments.

Livestreamed land: Scams and certainty in Myanmar’s digital land market

Scams are endemic to digital capitalism, whether they manifest as bitcoin bubbles or bullshit jobs. Drawing on two years of digital ethnography in Myanmar’s Facebook land markets, this article explains what happens when the land scam migrates online. By unraveling warnings of trickery, interviewing wary participants, and inhabiting Facebook Live real estate tours, we argue that the scam is a vocation born of hope and desperation that targets land as the most-stable asset amidst crisis, one which operates through the networked and affective affordances of social media sites. Specifically, we highlight how Facebook enables brokers to ‘crowd’ transactions and amplify hype around sought-after plots, obscuring risk and responsibility while generating excitement and competition. Live video formats enable brokers to cultivate digital intimacy and authenticity from afar, creating a collective emotional investment in what we call the “virtual reality of land.” Bringing together critical geography and media studies, our analysis situates the scam in particular histories of inequality while explaining how these relations are reformulated through social media sites' sensory, affective, and connective affordances.

Ibn Khaldûn and the Political Economy of Communication in the Age of Digital Capitalism

Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406) was a philosopher, historian and sociologist. This paper asks: What elements of the Political Economy of Communication are there in Ibn Khaldûn’s work and how do they matter in digital capitalism? It presents relevant passages from Khaldûn’s main work Muqaddimah and points out parallels between the Muqaddimah and works in Political Economy, especially Karl Marx’s approach of the Critique of Political Economy. The comparison of Khaldûn to Marx is not an arbitrary choice. Several scholars have pointed out parallels between the two’s works with respect to general Political Economy. It, therefore, makes sense to, also, compare Khaldûn and Marx in the context of the Political Economy of Communication. The paper analyses the relevance of Khaldûn’s ideas in digital capitalism. Khaldûn’s works are situated in the context of media and communication theory, digital automation, Facebook, Google, labour in informational and digital capitalism, Amazon, the tabloid press, fake news and post-truth culture. The analysis shows that Khaldûn’s Muqaddimah is an early work in Political Economy that can and should inform our contemporary critical analysis of communication in society, communication in capitalism and class society, ideology and digital capitalism. What connects Marx and Khaldûn is that they were critical scholars who although living at different times in different parts of the world saw the importance of the analysis of class and communication. Their works can and should inform the Political Economy of Communication and the analysis of digital capitalism.

Ideological Analysis of Digital Capitalism in the Context of Marxist Political Economy Critique

Abstract This paper focuses on analyzing and studying digital capitalism using a textual analysis model in the context of Marxist political economy. The magnitude of the angle between text vectors can be used to measure the similarity between digital capitalism and political economy. An iterative computational approach is employed to address the issue of overfitting in text. Constructing a BERT model involves formulating a self-attentive mechanism and setting up an embedding layer. The direction of digital capitalism’s ideology in the political economy context is examined about its characteristics. The results show that digital labor is more secretive regarding office location than traditional labor, with a secrecy rate of 60%. Unpaidness, large quantity, and potential value dominate data characteristics, with 90% unpaid data.

A NETNOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPT OF CREATIVE LABOR IN DIGITAL MEDIA THROUGH THE INTERVIEWS OF THE INFLUENCERS

With the increasing importance of cultural industries in the global economy, communication and media studies started to consider creative labor as an important concept to focus on. However, there is an ambiguity about where exactly this concept is positioned within capitalist relations. This study, in which the autonomy conditions of creative labor are discussed, examines the position of the concept of creative labor in digital capitalism in the context of critical political economy. In the study, the debates about the utopian "creative class" are critically examined and the ability of creative labor to isolate itself from the wheels of the capitalist system in the digital world is questioned. In this context, a discussion is carried out on how creative labor can be analyzed within the the thoughts of Marx, Smith and Fuchs. In this research, the concept of social media influencer, which is analyzed as a type of creative labor, has been discussed within the framework of creative labor, Fuchs' digital labor theory and Marx's labor theory of value. In light of this discussion, a netnographic analysis is made on the creative workers who take place as “influencers” in the digital media, in order to question their awareness, evaluation and comments about the position of their labor in the system. Using this analysis method, the interviews of the social media infuencers selected have been watched on Youtube and an interpretation have been made within the framework of the study questions. In the findings of the research, influencers are unaware that they are under the exploitation of the labor processes and the small group that owns the means of production.

State, platform, and misogynistic disinformation in China

The dissemination of disinformation that devalues and discredits women as individuals or communities online is a prominent manifestation of misogyny in contemporary China. As a longstanding system of structural oppression, misogyny in China has its roots in the deeply-sedimented framework of patriarchal Confucianism, which underpins the conventional social norms of male supremacy and female subordination. Today, amid the rise of “platform society” where the dual power of digital capitalism and the authoritarian state dictates the social space, misogyny has gained greater momentum, joining forces with disinformation and subjecting women to complex forms of oppression. Based on analysis of the Huolala case in which a woman tragically died, not only physically, but also reputationally under a wave of disinformation, this article discusses how the state power and digital platforms have conspired to co-create an intensified misogynistic environment in contemporary China through a set of techno-social and techno-cultural mechanisms.

The Solutionist Ethic and the Spirit of Digital Capitalism

Digital technologies are rapidly transforming economies and societies. Scholars have approached this rise of digital capitalism from various angles. However, relatively little attention has been paid to digital capitalism’s cultural underpinnings and the beliefs of those who develop most digital technologies. In this paper, we argue that a solutionist order of worth – in which value derives from solving social problems through technology – has become central to an emerging spirit of digital capitalism. We use supervised learning to trace the relative importance of different orders of worth in three novel text corpora. We find that solutionism is indeed central to the normative beliefs of digital elites and the broader digital milieu, but not to capitalist discourse at large. We illustrate the importance of these findings by discussing how the spirit of digital capitalism motivates, legitimates, and orients the actions of digital capitalists.