Digital Capitalism and its Limits

* 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

Contents

Contains as chapter 8:

* Essay / Chapter: Commons Economics. By Michel Bauwens, Rok Kranjc, and Mayssam Daboul. Wits University Press, 2024. Chapter 8 of: Digital Capitalism and its Limits. Technotopia, Power and Risk. Edited by Vishwas Satgar, 2024

URL = https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/101192/1/9781776149445_WEB.pdf#page=160

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)