* Book: Digital Capitalism and its Limits. Technotopia, Power and Risk. Edited by Vishwas Satgar. Wits University Press, 2024

URL = https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/101192/9781776149445_WEB.pdf?sequence=1

"In chapter 8, Michel Bauwens, Rok Kranjc and Mayssam Daaboul investigate a commons economics framework for emancipatory social relations as the basis of digitaltechnology. They depart from neoclassical and neoliberal economics by recognising that these bodies of thought create scarcity in abundance and, where there is scarcity, tend to create artificial scarcity. Moreover, they argue that the state and market historically have been extractive institutions. At the same time, the world is in a planetary crisis and weakened states are unable to rise to the magnitude and scales of the crisis. In this chapter, they derive from historical and contemporary practices of digital commoning a set of principles for an alternative commons economics framework, which could serve as the basis for commons society and civilisation. In this regard, they highlight the following eight principles for commons economics: it is biophysical; it is about abundance design; it is contributory; the commons is a central human institution; it is based on open collaborative systems; there is a focus on the common good; it has a steady-state temporality; and it is relational."

Chapter by Chapter Outline

Vishwas Satgar:

"In chapter 1, Vishwas Satgar poses this poignant question: will the climate crisis or digital capitalism destroy life on earth?

While this might sound like hyperbole, when grounded in an analysis of the political economy/ecology of contemporary capitalism, the ideological frames, power dynamics and risks locking in these possible futures become extremely terrifying. In this chapter, the much-vaunted arrival of digital capitalism and its next big leap, the 4IR, is brought under critical scrutiny. The dynamics locking in the destructive side of digital capitalism are magnified to highlight what is occluded by technotopian futurism, the class power relations shaping digital capitalism and the risks posed in a world in the grip of the fourth great crisis of capitalism: a polycrisis of socio-ecological reproduction. Going beyond Yanis Varoufakis’s analysis of techno-feudalism, this chapter questions digital technology itself. It argues that the dangerous contradictions of digital capitalism require a fundamental pause on the forward advance of such technologies. Digital technology is not inevitable, and it does not have to have power over life-worlds. It embeds power relations, design biases and normative mental models. Most of all, it embeds a rationality of profit-making, with the human user the source of money-making data, which in turn is used to shape their choices. We need to ask if the dreams of Silicon Valley are the same for all of us. These digital and AI techno leaps are meaningless in a world poised to be scorched by climate change. This chapter elaborates, through a decolonial Marxist eco-feminist perspective, several theses on the dangerous contradictions of digital capitalism.

In chapter 2, Jane Duncan focuses on digital mass surveillance as a form of technotopia, internationally and in South Africa. Otherwise known as Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), state intelligence agencies use this form of surveillance to supplement or even replace older, slower and riskier surveillance methods using human collection and analysis. Justifications for SIGINT surveillance tend to be inherently techno-optimist and techno-determinist and linked to 4IR ideology and its assumptions that digital technologies will provide silver bullets for all major social problems. Intelligence agencies in the thrall of 4IR ideology assume that digitising, collecting and analysing as much data as possible offers a superior form of intelligence that ensures that they miss no potential or actual national security threats. Intelligence agencies use SIGINT mainly for strategic purposes, to enable policy-makers to anticipate long-term trends in the national security environment and identify external threats they may not be aware of, such as a plan to attack the country from outside its borders. While SIGINT surveillance is dominated by the major imperialist powers – and particularly the US and the UK – sub-imperialist countries like South Africa, through the State Security Agency’s National Communication Centre, have embraced this form of surveillance and its underlying assumptions. However, in their rush to embrace SIGINT surveillance, and a technotopian vision of digitally enabled peace and security, intelligence agencies and their political masters have glossed over many of the problems inherent in this form of surveillance. The disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have also shown that the major imperialist powers have used SIGINT not so much for protecting global security, but for pursuing imperialism by other means and deepening peripheralisation of former colonies, especially in Africa. In the process, the world is becoming even more unstable, unsafe and insecure. This chapter explores the relevance of technotopian ideas for mass digital surveillance. It examines how these supposedly cutting-edge intelligence ideas and practices have played themselves out in South Africa.

Chapter 3, by Ujala Satgoor, explores the contradictions, challenges and opportunities for shaping libraries in South Africa towards fostering an informed and educated citizenry in a digital world. The chapter foregrounds the intersection of structural inequalities and their impact on the social justice role of the national ecosystem of libraries. In the face of South Africa’s deepening literacy and reading crisis, and digital divide, this chapter considers how its libraries, by including digital infrastructure and platforms, have attempted to redress historical exclusion and redefine their relevance; transform the way people access, consume and interact with information; and embed digital equity. Several important digital interventions have happened to foster a reading culture, but a reading crisis still persists. The limits of social inclusion efforts and digital reading technology to develop a reading culture are explored. This chapter concludes that, by itself, digitising reading and providing a techno solution outside of embedded social relations will not solve literacy and equity challenges. South Africans, as a nation, need to value the importance of a reading nation, rethink its historic library model and make the shift to a community-led paradigm, where the social contextual needs of the community take precedence. Given the complexity of the reading crisis, there is room for both print and digital reading modalities to shape a societal reading culture into the future.

Constantine Nana in chapter 4 explores the regulation lag of digital capitalism and its risks.

Like most innovative concepts and devices that drive economic growth in an epoch, digital platforms have received high praise, faint praise and harsh criticisms. The criticisms are mostly based on the use of the platforms in the context of the sharing economy, access economy, platform economy, platform cooperativism and platform capitalism. These fairly ambiguous concepts represent vehicles, abstract and concrete, for operating a variant of capitalism that has emerged with the rise of digitisation. By replacing traditional business models in most industries, digital platforms have ushered in a new era of capitalism that is led by a new breed of capitalists who enjoy functional sovereignty. They monopolise control, set rules, adjudicate disputes and police transactions in the virtual world. This has, in turn, incited a rebellion against digital capitalism, which is blamed for harnessing the internet solely to the cause of data extraction, accumulation and advertising. Despite a very rich scholarship on the subject, regulators around the world are still grappling with contending approaches and philosophies in a bid to rein in the digital capitalist. This chapter essentially provides a diagnosis of the digital capitalism problem and explains the regulation riddle in developing African countries.

A crucial focus in this volume is on how digital technology is remaking the labour process, how power prevails over digital platform workers (some as employees and some not) and how they are responding to the asymmetries in power relations.

In chapter 5, Ruth Castel-Branco, Seipati Mokhema and Edward Webster explore emerging forms of worker struggle, utilising a resources of power approach, in relation to the proliferation of digital platforms in the global South. They draw on a collection of interdisciplinary case studies conducted by the Future of Work(ers) Research Group at the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies. The first section provides an overview of their conceptual framework, which combines an analysis of macro-structural transformations, the changing labour process and emerging sources of worker power. The second traces the variegated ways in which digital labour platforms are embedded within global processes of value production and accumulation. It centres on four case studies of digital platforms founded in the global South: the click farm GanharNoInsta in Brazil; the e-commerce platform Mercado Libre in Argentina; the delivery company Rappi Inc. in Colombia; and agritechs in Ghana. The third section explores how digital labour platforms have restructured the labour process and conditions of work through algorithmic management. It focuses on six aspects of working conditions: income and wages; working hours and paid leave; social protection; occupational health and safety; collective bargaining; and data ownership. The fourth section analyses emerging forms of worker struggle. The chapter concludes that the transformative possibilities of worker struggle are ultimately shaped by the sectors in which platforms are embedded, the institutional frameworks in which they operate and the terms of collective action.

In chapter 6, Vincent Siwawa continues investigating the asymmetry in power relations under digital capitalism.

His chapter delves into the intricate dynamics of power and control within the realm of digital platforms operating in the informal recycling sector. Specifically, it examines the internet-of-waste pickers’ system and dissects the relationships between the owners of digital platforms, waste pickers, formal recycling markets, and the wider social and political landscape. The ultimate aim is to understand how power over waste pickers works in the recycling value chain as it undergoes digital transformation. The research scrutinises three internet-of-waste pickers’ systems: BanQu, Kudoti and Regenize, all of which are operated by multinational corporations like Unilever, Coca-Cola and Distell in South Africa. The analysis unveils the mechanisms through which power is exercised, including control over platform access and ownership, decision-making processes, data ownership and control, as well as disparities in technological skills and literacy. The chapter underscores the potential advantages and disadvantages brought about by digital platforms in the informal recycling sector, emphasising the urgency to rectify power imbalances to ensure just and equitable outcomes for waste pickers.

In chapter 7, Alex Mashilo continues investigating technological transformation in the labour process, but his research and analytic optic is trained on the largest manufacturing base in South Africa, namely, automotive manufacturing. Mashilo explores the restructuring of the automotive manufacturing industry and labour’s response, particularly the response of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. This chapter is grounded in both his own ethnographic research as a worker in this industry for many years and also in his PhD investigation. Car manufacturing in South Africa has immense structural power, contributing about 7 per cent to national GDP; it is deeply integrated into global circuits and is under constant pressure to be ‘globally competitive’. This means its restructuring processes are deeply connected to technology, labour training and employment challenges. Mashilo draws on his reading of Marx on process upgrading and situates automation in Marx’s critique of capitalism. The remaking of the labour process with machinery was central to Marx’s understanding of capital and how it created value. Mashilo builds on this analysis to provide an understanding of the labour process and technology in automotive manufacturing, highlighting the role of digital technology and automation. While capital’s power to drive restructuring has been formidable, Mashilo highlights the role of labour resistance, its forms of power and how it plays out in policy struggles around the transition to electric vehicles policy.

In chapter 8, Michel Bauwens, Rok Kranjc and Mayssam Daaboul investigate a commons economics framework for emancipatory social relations as the basis of digital technology.

They depart from neoclassical and neoliberal economics by recognising that these bodies of thought create scarcity in abundance and, where there is scarcity, tend to create artificial scarcity. Moreover, they argue that the state and market historically have been extractive institutions. At the same time, the world is in a planetary crisis and weakened states are unable to rise to the magnitude and scales of the crisis. In this chapter, they derive from historical and contemporary practices of digital commoning a set of principles for an alternative commons economics framework, which could serve as the basis for commons society and civilisation. In this regard, they highlight the following eight principles for commons economics: it is biophysical; it is about abundance design; it is contributory; the commons is a central human institution; it is based on open collaborative systems; there is a focus on the common good; it has a steady-state temporality; and it is relational.

Finally, in chapter 9, Michael Kwet makes the case for digital degrowth as part of eco-socialism.

The twenty-first-century global economy is largely driven by Big Tech and, more broadly, digital capitalism. This is a global phenomenon, with US power at the centre preying on global markets through the process of digital colonialism. Mainstream antidotes to the ills of Big Tech and digital capitalism are US/Eurocentric and revolve around a collection of liberal and progressive capitalist reforms, with a focus on antitrust to address the market power of tech corporations. However, antitrust and other liberal-progressive business regulations, such as privacy law and algorithmic governance, operate within a capitalist framework that ignores or neglects digital colonialism and the twenty-first-century ecological crisis, despite their analytical and moral centrality to the contemporary political economy. This chapter argues that a combination of political, economic and social alternatives rooted in digital degrowth are needed to turn the tide against digital colonisation and save the planet. Solutions entail the socialisation of knowledge and infrastructure; passing socialist laws that support digital socialism; and the construction of a new narrative about the tech ecosystem. These solutions are to be nested within an anti-colonial, eco-socialist framework that embraces degrowth to ensure environmental sustainability and socio-economic justice for the digital age."

Excerpt

From the introduction, by Vishwas Satgar:

"A great leap is happening in digital capitalism with artificial intelligence, robotics, gene editing, quantum computing and 3D printing all vaunted as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Billions are being invested and we are told this shift in digital capitalism is inevitable. Moreover, we are told that despite the existential risks we should embrace a capitalist world in which humans will be dominated by general artificial intelligence (AI), when AI reaches human levels of cognition and even surpasses human intelligence. Ultimately, 4IR technotopia suggests it will solve all our problems. The common-sense talk is of machines being more unhuman in their intelligence, having superpowers beyond human capacities and eventually being completely autonomous to decide their own course of action. The speed, computing power and capabilities of algorithmic intelligence give credence to this technotopian claim and have prompted the question: is this the final human invention (Barrat 2023)? Yet, democratic deliberation and critical public discourse are lagging behind and the totalitarian implications of such technologies to transform every aspect of our life-worlds is not being engaged with sufficiently. The 4IR techno shift is a serious development for our societies, for the futures of our species and for ecological relations.

Massive financial investment is driving the development of this 4IR, and the dominant techno-nationalist narrative, in South Africa and beyond, is to embrace this as progress, development and more growth. Narrow economic and market-friendly reasoning dominates the narrative, while occluding deeper thinking. In volume 3 in the Democratic Marxism series, The Climate Crisis, it was argued that the worsening climate crisis was reduced to a market problem in the hegemonic mainstream and hence only market solutions will suffice. Ultimately, such solutions have not enabled decisive leadership, while systemic transformations in the interests of human and non-human life have been blocked. In this volume, the 4IR discourse is also highlighted as being shot through with market-centric rationality. But such economistic thinking, placing exaggerated technotopian assertions about the social value of such technologies, growth and profits at the centre of social change, is just dangerous and fails to appreciate the magnitude of the risks and interconnections of a polycrisis world; a civilisational crisis of socio-ecological reproduction explored in volume 2 (Capitalism’s Crises) and volume 7 (Emancipatory Feminism in the Time of Covid-19) of the Democratic Marxism series. Important questions are being ignored or simply treated as inconsequential because a shallow digital futurism constantly claims that AI will solve it all. For instance, will the 4IR bring more unemployment, inequality and anti-democratic dynamics to the fore? How is it changing capitalism itself? What is it doing to us as a species? Who benefits from the power relations it constitutes? Will it worsen the polycrisis?

Despite the money behind such an innovation we need to assess the risks and limits, but we also need to ask if we want domination of our life-worlds by such algorithmically determined technology. None of this innovation, its place in our societies, is inevitable. Digital monopolies are driving this shift, and they can be stopped. In this regard, understanding the power relations embedding this digital techno shift is crucial, and how these power relations are transforming capitalism and socio-ecological reproduction and impacting on our species has to be brought to the fore. In this regard, the volume embraces a critical techno-realist perspective that does not reject, nor does it blindly support the techno shift of digital capitalism (Duncan 2022). Moreover, it centres the 4IR as a class project of the digital monopoly fraction of global capitalism intent on unleashing a new wave of accumulation, driven by a technotopian imaginary working with ambitious assumptions about the role and implications of such technology. This volume, number 8 in the Democratic Marxism series, continues a political ecology research focus drawing on decolonial-Marxist-eco-feminism, critical social analysis, labour process studies and emancipatory futures thinking. It furnishes an interdisciplinary perspective to think more deeply and critically about digital capitalism. As a result, it invites us to be open to reject aspects of digital capitalism in the public interest, democratise it and even subject it to a just transition to protect human and non-human life. This introduction starts by situating the place of technology in classical Marxist thought and how such understandings shaped the directions of historical materialism. It highlights the limits and problems of such approaches to understanding the dangerous contradictions and high risks of digital capitalism. Second, the introduction clarifies the concept of technotopia and its usage in this volume. Technotopia has existed since the advent of capitalism, in which human progress was conjoined to the march of science and technological innovation. Even Marx and Engels had a technotopian aspect to their understanding of historical materialism and the primacy of ‘forces of production’, which is expressed in contemporary forms of productivist Marxism. While technotopia has mutated with the vicissitudes of capitalism through automation, productivity and competition, within digital capitalism it has a historical specificity as the belief system and ideological imaginary of digital monopoly capital. It is grounded in a digital techno ontology with dangerous presuppositions, claims and conceptions about the social value and role of such technology. How such an ideology functions is critically interrogated to also foreground the dangers of such thinking. The final section introduces the other chapters in this volume and their critical engagements with digital capitalism. Thematically the chapters in this volume span a range of issues, including highlighting dangerous contradictions, surveillance dangers, limits of using digital solutions for complex social problems such as reading, and regulation lag risks of digital capitalism. Then, there is a focus on digital capitalism, the labour process and power relations. This includes a focus on digital capitalist platforms and new forms of labour organising, power dynamics in waste picker digital platforms and robotised car manufacturing. Finally, there is an attempt to think about transformative approaches to digital capitalism that could engender emancipatory futures: either as part of the commons and commoning or through digital degrowth eco-socialism."

(https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/101192/9781776149445_WEB.pdf?sequence=1)

Digital Capitalism and its Limits

Contents

Chapter by Chapter Outline

Excerpt

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