digital capitalism

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pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

economic value of, 41, 44 globalization of, 7, 78–79, 82 monetization of, 49–50 new goods and services from, 47, 49 open, 41, 197, 198 optimization of, 46–47 privacy and protection policy, 189–190 product tracking, 39, 47, 85, 196 productivity gains from, 196–197 RFID tracking, 39, 48, 85, 122 sensors, 38, 47, 70 See also Digital capital Debt, government, 62, 139–140, 186 (fig.) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. See DARPA Demand, 114–116, 117 (table) Denmark, 191, 193–194, 195, 199 Detroit, Michigan, 135 Deutsche Bank, 5, 69, 95 Deutsche Telekom, 177 Diageo, 104, 160 Digital capital, 47–52, 74, 86 Digital media digitization of, 39, 46 (fig.) investing in start-up, 52 monetization of, 50 sector crossover in, 173–174 Digital platforms new capital sources via, 143–144 new competitor entry via, 165–166, 170–172 new talent via, 154, 158, 160–161, 162 trade globalization via, 74, 85–86 Digitization, 39, 41, 46 (fig.)

See Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mobile Internet for aging population, 67, 70 banking via, 176–177 current advances in, 38, 40 (fig.) digital capital cost decline in, 48 education by, 161 evolution of, 35 (fig.) globalization of, 78–79 health-care industry and, 177 illiteracy and, 98 infrastructure productivity via, 197 messaging apps, 2, 42, 48, 172, 176 new consuming class use of, 97–98, 170 population, 6, 38, 42, 43 (table), 79, 97–98, 170 Mobilink, 161 Modi, Narendra, 2 MoMaths, 161 Monetary policy loosening, 134–135, 138–140 tightening, 10, 185–186 Monetization of debt, 139–140 of digital capital, 48–50 Moore’s law, 33, 34, 155 Morocco, 80, 81 (table) Moyer, Jamie, 60 M-pesa, 176 Mulally, Alan, 203 Mumbai, India, 29, 131–132 Nanomaterials, 34–36 Natural disasters, 41, 88–89, 119 Natural gas extraction, 2, 36, 116, 125, 141, 196 The Nature of Technology (Arthur), 33 Ndemo, Bitange, 41 Nestlé, 105 Netflix, 173–174 Netherlands, 113 (table), 184 (table) New competitors, 165–179 adaptation to, 174–179 alliances with, 176–177 digital platforms and, 165–166, 170–172 historical entry waves of, 167, 168, 169 (fig.), 170 instant global entry of, 80, 84–85, 170–172 monitoring and understanding, 174–175 price transparency and, 173 sector crossover from, 173–174, 176–177 speed and scale of, 11, 100, 170, 171 (table) talent relocation and, 177–178 trend break from, 10–11, 80, 84–85, 166–168 New consuming class, 93–110 adaptation to, 9, 25–26, 98–109 Africa as, 101, 102 aging population as, 66–70, 101 Brazil as, 97, 101, 102 business organization strategy for, 107–109 China as, 93–94, 96–97, 97 (fig.), 98, 99 (fig.), 101 creation of, 94 demand increase by, 114–116 economic value of, 96, 97 (fig.)

As much as two-thirds of the value created by new Internet offerings is captured as consumer surplus—in the form of lower prices, improvements in productivity, or greater choices and convenience.40 The disruptive technologies discussed earlier will likely deliver the lion’s share of their value to consumers, even while providing companies with sufficient profit to encourage adoption and production. To illustrate the scale of the opportunity, consider this change: on July 31, 2013, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis released GDP figures that for the first time categorized research and development and software into a new category of “intellectual property products.” We estimate that digital capital is now the source of roughly one-third of total global GDP growth, with intangible assets (think of the value of Google’s search algorithm or Amazon’s recommendation engine) being the main driver.41 For businesses and governments alike, failing to navigate today’s technological tide will mean losing out on a huge economic opportunity as well as increasing vulnerability to potential disruptions.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

In China, it is continuous connection that underpins the government’s vision of “a networked, intelligent, service-oriented, coordinated ‘Internet Plus’ industrial ecology system,”32 a strategy that serves China’s desire to acquire both greater economic independence from the West and greater influence within global digital capitalism.33 In India, the Aadhaar unique ID system introduced in 2009 is creating huge new opportunities for data exploitation by both government and corporations, although it faces greater civil-society opposition than have parallel developments so far in China.34 Such costs to human autonomy are not accidental but intrinsic to emerging logics of connection that treat the continuous monitoring of human subjects as not exceptional but “natural.”

Data colonialism interposes infrastructures of data extraction directly into the texture of human life and so risks deforming human experience in a fundamental way, invading the space of the self on which the values of autonomy and freedom in all their forms depend.130 Our Argument within the Wider Debate about Data and Capitalism Why is it that so far we have talked simply of capitalism and not digital capitalism, informational capitalism, communicative capitalism, platform capitalism, or surveillance capitalism, to name some rival terms?131 The reason is straightforward. No convincing argument has yet been made that capitalism today is anything other than what it has always been: the systematic organization of life so as to maximize value, resulting in the concentration of power and wealth in very few hands.

Where they are not converted into actual money, they are converted into accounting money.” We are arguing, however, that the “means of labour” include both labor itself, with its means of reproduction, and the expanding conditions, or factors, of production. 71. Scott, Seeing Like a State. 72. Schiller, Digital Capitalism, 8, 13–24; and Panitch and Gindin, Global Capitalism, 148, 189, 191, 288. 73. Habermas, Communicative Action, vol. 2, 196, 305, an argument developed in relation to social media platforms by Valtysson, “Facebook as a Digital Public Sphere.” The closest Habermas comes to unpacking the metaphor of “colonization” is on page 355, where he says system imperatives “make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it.”


pages: 268 words: 112,708

Culture works: the political economy of culture by Richard Maxwell

1960s counterculture, accelerated depreciation, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, business process, commoditize, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, intermodal, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, structural adjustment programs, talking drums, telemarketer, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Thorstein Veblen, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture

.: SouthWest Organizing Project, 1995). 9. Thomas A. Downes and Shane M. Greenstein, “Do Commercial ISPs Provide Universal Access?” (December 2, 1998). Available: http://skew2.kellogg.nwu.edu/~greenste/ research/papers/tprcbook.pdf (July 22, 1999). 10. Schiller, Digital Capitalism, 30–31. 11. “Fair Taxation in Cyberspace,” New York Times, October 2, 1998, A28. 12. Schiller, Digital Capitalism, 143–202. 13. Donella H. Meadows, “The Secret Life of My Computer” (March 13, 1997). Available: http://iisd.ca/pcdf/meadows/computer.htm (July 11, 1999). 14. Peter Huber and Mark P. Mills, “Dig More Coal—the PCs Are Coming,” Forbes (May 31, 1999).

Available: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/5.pdf (July 22, 1999). d Leslie Walker, “Rivals Cede Throne to AOL,” Washington Post, April 8, 1999, E1. e Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 150. f Schiller, Digital Capitalism, 32–34. g Monua Janah, “Web Portals Try Mass Marketing,” San Jose Mercury News, April 4, 1999. b As Figure 8.3. Internet-related market concentration, with dominant firms’ share of U.S. market. The wealth of information on the Web is increasingly also an immense collection of commodities, defined as “resource[s] produced for the market by wage labor.”38 Of course, users come to the Web, like any medium, with their own purposes in mind.

Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998. National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Falling through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide. Washington, D.C.: National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 1999. Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Webster, Frank, and Kevin Robins. Information Technology: A Luddite Analysis. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1986. 220 The Web Notes 1. See Dan Schiller, “The Information Commodity: A Preliminary View,” in Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution, ed.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

If information is not given its due credit the implications from it cannot be drawn, but are left to apologetics to interpret for their own ends.8 The insight of Roland Barthes on how mythology works can be of assistance here. He says that a myth, to be plausible, always contains a core of truth. The lie just casts the significance of the facts in a different light. When futurists jump on the Information-age bandwagon they set out to glorify digital capitalism. Thus they dig out all those potentialities in capitalism that are humane, in other words, that are the contradictory tendencies pointing away from capitalism, towards communism. The irony comes full circle when progressive scholars, anxious to reveal the ideological smokescreen of the apologists, respond by fiercely denouncing the same potentialities.

For instance, as will be discussed towards the end of the chapter, the exceptionalism ascribed to information that underpins the claim about a digital gift economy and information commons, does not hold water when examined closer. It is crucial to problematise these concepts or else we might be tricked into singing in a different tune the official hymn of digital capitalism in a different tune. The key controversy in the debate over historical materialism is to what extent technological development modifies class relations as opposed to the impact of class struggle in shaping technology. It is a question that cuts right through the Marxist tradition and is also present in Karl Marx’s authorship.12 A conceptual weakness with the first approach, the technicist line of reasoning, is that technology is here understood as a self-explanatory, coherent and delimited category.

The opposite point of view contends that capitalism is closest to being superseded where it is most developed. It is the second tradition of thought that this book ascribes to. Nevertheless, George Caffentzis’ insistence on the importance of the proletariat in the Third World to the existence of cutting-edge, digital capitalism provides a healthy reality check. His reasoning is theoretically sound, though it does not provide an exhaustive explanation. As will be argued at length, capital has more options for sustaining profitability than increasing the rate of exploitation of workers in the periphery. Shifting production from waged employees to unpaid users is another possibility, a trend that is persistent in the industrialised economies.


pages: 254 words: 69,276

The Metric Society: On the Quantification of the Social by Steffen Mau

Airbnb, cognitive bias, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, connected car, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, future of work, gamification, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, mittelstand, moral hazard, personalized medicine, positional goods, principal–agent problem, profit motive, QR code, reserve currency, school choice, selection bias, sharing economy, smart cities, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Uber for X, vertical integration, web of trust, Wolfgang Streeck

At Amazon, for example, the scanner system means the company ‘can monitor not only the exact location of all goods stored but also track its employees’ activities – where they are, how many articles they handle in a given period of time, and how their performance compares to that of their co-workers. In performance review meetings with employees, management can draw on the symbolic power of “objective” numbers’ (Nachtwey & Staab 2016: 467). In their analysis of ‘digital capitalism’, Nachtwey & Staab come to the conclusion that ‘Today, apps and algorithms have assumed the role of the assembly line’ (2016: 469). This trend is taken even further by applications in the field of so-called ‘people analytics’ (Waber 2013). Here, sociometric badges – also known as sociometers – are used to record every move and every conversation, and consist of tiny, sensor-equipped tracking tools worn on a lanyard.

Zur Kolonisierung des wissenschaftsinternen Wettbewerbs durch wissenschaftsexterne Evaluationsverfahren’ in Neue Steuerung von Hochschulen. Eine Zwischenbilanz, ed. Jörg Bogumil and Rolf G. Heinze, Berlin: Edition Sigma (pp. 68-93). Nachtwey, Oliver, and Philipp Staab (2016) ‘Market and labour control in digital capitalism’, Triple C 14/2 (pp. 457-74). Nassehi, Armin (2016) Die Wiedergewinnung des Politischen. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Wahlverweigerung und kompromisslosem Protest, Berlin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. Neckel, Sighard (2001) ‘“Leistung” und “Erfolg”’ in Gesellschaftsbilder im Umbruch. Soziologische Perspektiven in Deutschland, ed.

Index ‘20-70-10’ rule 155 academics 139 and altmetrics 77–8 and h-index 75–6, 139, 144 self-documentation and self-presentation 76–7 status markers 74–8 accountability 3, 91, 115, 120, 134, 147, 159 accounting, rise of modern 17 activism alliance with statistics 127 Acxiom 164–5 ADM (automated decision-making) 63 Aenta 108 Airbnb 88 airlines and status miles 71–2 algorithms 7, 64, 127, 167 and nomination power 123–5, 126, 141–2 AlgorithmWatch 127 altmetrics 77–8 Amazon 96, 150, 156 American Consumers Union 167 apps 99, 105, 150 finance 66–7 fitness and health 68, 102–3, 104, 107 Moven 65–6 Asian crisis (1997) 57 audit society 24–5 automated decision-making (ADM) 63 averages, regime of 155–7 Barlösius, Eva 113 Baty, Phil 48 Bauman, Zygmunt 143 behavioural reactivity 131 benchmarks, regime of 155–7 Berlin, television tower 40 Better Life Index 20 Big Data 2, 79, 123 biopolitics 19 of the market 70 biopower 19 Boam, Eric 104 body images, regime of 156–7 Boltanzki, Luc 125–6 border controls 73–4 borders, smart 74 Bourdieu, Pierre 111, 114, 115, 162 BP 108 Bude, Heinz 37 bureaucracy 18 calculative practices 11, 124 expansion of 11, 115 and the market 15–17 Campbell, Donald T. 130–1 Campbell's Law 130–1 capitalism 15, 54, 55 digital 150 capitalists of the self 163 Carter, Allan 48 Chiapello, Ève 125–6 Chief Financial Officer (CFO) 17 China Sesame Credit 67 Social Credit System 1, 166 choice revolution 118–19 class and status 33 class conflict switch to individual competition 168–70 classification 60–80 see also scoring; screening collective body 104–6 collective of non-equals 166–8 commensurability 31–3, 44, 159 Committee of Inquiry on ‘Growth, Wealth and Quality of Life’ (Germany) 127 commodification 163, 164 Community (sitcom) 96 companies 16–17 comparison 7, 26–39, 159 and commensurability/incommensurability 31–3 and competition 28 dispositive(s) of 7, 28–31, 159, 169 new horizons of 33–5 part of everyday life 27 prerequisites for social 35–6 registers of 135–9 and self-esteem 30 shifts in class structure of 33 and status 29–30, 36–7 universalization of 27–8 COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling or Alternative Sanctions) 79 competition 6, 7, 115–19, 159–60 and comparison 28 increasing glorification of 159 and neoliberalism 23 and performance measurement 115–19 and quantification 116–17 and rankings 45 switch from class conflict to individual 168–70 competitive singularities 169 consumer generated content (CGC) 85–6 control datafication and increased 143, 147, 169 individualization of social 143 levers of social 144 relationship between quantification and 78 conventionalization 128 Cordray, Julia 97 Correctional Offender Management Profiling or Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS) 79 Corruption Perceptions Index 26 cosmetic indicators 135 Couchsurfing 88 credit risk colonialization 64 credit scoring 63–7 and social status 67 criminal recidivism, scoring and assessment of 62–3, 79 criteria reductionism 22 cumulative advantages, theory of 174 CureTogether 106 customer reviews 82–6, 87, 88 Dacadoo 68 Daily Telegraph 149 darknet 87 data behaviourism 171 data leaks 152 data literacy 21 data mining 4, 22, 163 data protection 72, 142 data repositories 62, 73–4 data storage 22, 73, 135 data voluntarism 4, 152, 153, 159 dating markets and health scores 70 de Botton, Alain 30 decoupling 133, 136, 174–5 democratization and digitalization 166 difference 2 visibilization and the creation of 40–3 ‘difference revolution’ digitalization giving rise to 166–7 digital capitalism 150 digital disenfranchisement of citizens 151 digital health plans 70 digital medical records 67 digitalization 2, 7, 21–2, 25, 63, 73, 80, 111, 123, 180 and democratization 166 giving rise to ‘difference revolution’ 166–7 as ‘great leveller’ 166 quantitative bias of 124 disembedding 13 distance, technology of 23–4 diversity versus monoculture 137–40 doctors, evaluation of by patients 92–3 Doganova, Liliana 5–6 double-entry bookkeeping 15, 163 e-recruitment 61 eBay 87 economic valuation theory 5 economization 22–4, 38, 115, 117 and rise of rankings 46 education and evaluation 89–91 evaluation of tutors by students 89–90 law schools 44, 138–9 output indicators and resource allocation in higher 132 and Pisa system 122, 145–6 Eggers, Dave The Circle 41, 82–3 employer review sites 83 entrepreneurial self 3, 154 epistemic communities 121 equivalence 16, 27 Espeland, Wendy 44, 139 esteem 29, 30 and estimation 15, 38 see also self-esteem Etzioni, Amitai The Active Society 20 European Union 122 evaluation 81–98 connection with recognition 38 cult and spread of 7, 97–8, 134 education sector 89–91 loss of time and energy 136 and medical sector 91–3 peer-to-peer ratings 87–8 portals as selectors 84–6 pressure exerted by reviews 147–8 and professions 89–93 qualitative 117 satisfaction surveys 82–4 and social media 93–8 of tutors by students 89–90 evidence-basing 3 exercise and self-tracking 101–4 expert systems 7 transnational 121–2 experts, nomination power of 119–23, 126 Facebook 94 FanSlave 95 Federal Foreign Office (Germany) 53 feedback power of 147–8 and social media 93–4 Fertik, Michael 66 Fitch 56 fitness apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 Floridi, Luciano 105 Foucault, Michel 19 Fourcade, Marion 163–4 Franck, Georg 29 fraud 137 Frey, Bruno ‘Publishing as Prostitution’ 146 ‘gaming the system’ 132 GDP (gross domestic product) 14 dispute over alternatives to 127–8 General Electric 155 Germany Excellence Initiative 51 higher education institutes 52–3 Gerstner, Louis V. 130 Glassdoor.com 83 global governance 122 globalization 34, 73 governance 12 self- 19, 37, 105 state as data manager 17–20 ‘government at a distance’ 145 governmentality 112 GPS systems 150 Granovetter, Mark ‘The strength of weak ties’ 147 gross domestic product see GDP h-index 75–6, 139, 144 halo effect 90 Han, Byung-Chul 154 Hanoi, rat infestation of 130 happiness and comparison 30 Hawthorne effect 107 health and self-tracking 101–4 health apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 health scores 67–71 health status, quantified 67–71 Healy, Kieran 163–4 Heintz, Bettina 14, 33, 34 hierarchization/hierarchies 1, 5, 6, 11, 33, 39, 40–59, 174 and rankings 41–2, 43, 44, 48 higher education, output indicators and resource allocation 132 Hirsch, Jorge E. 75 home nursing care 135–6 hospitals and performance indicators 131 Human Development Index 14 hyperindividualization 167–8 identity theory 29 incommensurability 31–3 indicators 2, 3, 5, 20, 23–4, 34, 114, 159 and competition 116–17 and concept of reactive measurements 129–33 cosmetic 135 economic 7 governance by 24 politics of 14 status 35, 75 see also performance indicators individualization of social control 143 industrial revolution 19 inequality 6, 8, 158–76 collectives of non-equals 166–8 establishment of worth 160–2 inescapability and status fluidity 170–4 reputation management 162–6 switch from class conflict to individual competition 168–70 inescapability of status 170–4 information economy 2 information transmission interfaces, between social subsystems 165–6 institutional theory 113 insurance companies 72, 108, 151, 152, 167 International Labour Organization 122 investive status work 36–7 Italian Job, The (film) 138 justice 126 Kaube, Jürgen 2 Kula, Witold 16 Latour, Bruno 34 law schools 44, 138–9 league tables 35, 43, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 91, 138, 139, 146, 162, 175 legitimate test, concept of 125–6 Lenin, Vladimir 116 lifelogging 99, 109, 153 Luhmann, Niklas 166 Lyon, David 142 McClusky, Mark 101 McCullough, Nicole 97 Mann, Steve 153 market(s) calculative practices of 15–17 and neoliberalism 23 and rating agencies 55–6 Marron, Donncha 65 Matthew effect 174–5 measurement, meaning 10 media reporting 33 medical sector and evaluation 91–3 hospitals and performance indicators 131–2 MedXSafe 70 meritocracy 23, 161 Merton, Robert K. 161, 174 ‘metric revolution’ 16 Miller, Peter 112 mobility 71–4 border controls 73 digital monitoring of 72 and scoring 71–4 smart cars 72 and status miles 71–2 money as means of exchange 16 monoculture versus diversity 137–40 mood, self-tracking of 101–4 Moody's 56 motivation 106–10 and rankings 45 Moven 65–6 Münch, Richard 145 Nachtwey, Oliver 150 naturalization 113 neoliberalism 3, 12, 23, 25 basic tenets of 23 New Public Management 3, 117, 136, 155 NHS (National Health Service) 118 nomination power 111–28 and algorithms 123–5, 126, 141–2 critique of 125–8 and economization 115 of experts 119–23, 126 performance measurement and the framing of competition 115–19 and the state 112–15 non-equals, collectives of 166–8 normative pressure 144–6 North Korea 144 ‘number rush’ 2 numbers 13–14, 15 numerical medium 8, 14, 16, 18, 28, 33, 113, 160, 166 objectivization 35, 154, 160 OECD 122 Offe, Claus 175 Old Testament 17 omnimetrics 9 O’Neil, Cathy Weapons of Math Destruction 79 optimization 12, 25 Oral Roberts University (Oklahoma) 108 Peeple app 96–7 peer-to-peer ratings 87–8 Pentland, Alex 151 people analytics 150–1 performance enhancement 12 performance indicators 12, 38, 53, 74, 118, 119, 120, 129, 155 and hospitals 131–2 performance measurement 23, 38, 115–19 performance-oriented funding allocation 22 performance paradox 132 performance targets 4 Personicx 165 Pisa system 122, 145–6 politicians 14, 120 politics 114 portals 84–6, 88, 90–1 power of nomination see nomination power prestige 8, 29, 67, 144 principal–agent problem 147–8 private consultancy services 117 professional control, loss of 133–4 professionalization 19, 133 professions and evaluation 89–93 publicity 33 QS ranking 52 qualitative evaluation 117 quantification advantages of 8 engines of 21–5 history 11 impact and consequences of 5, 6 meaning 10, 12–15 risks and side-effects 7, 129–40 role of 35 quantified self 99–110 Quantified Self (network) 99–100 quantitative evaluation see evaluation quantitative mentality 11–12 quasi-markets 116, 118–19 race and assessment of criminal recidivism risk 79 rankings 47–53, 58–9, 60, 144 and competition 45 and compliance 44 differences between ratings and 42–3 disadvantage of 43–4 economization and rise of 46 and evaluation portals 84–6 and hierarchies 41–2, 43, 44, 48 and image fetishization 47 and motivation 45 as objectivity generators 41 performance-enhancing role 46 popularity of 41 as positional goods 45 purpose of 45 and reputation 48, 49, 50, 52 as social ushers 42 and status anxiety 46–7 university 6, 7, 43, 47–53, 144, 175 Welch's forced 155–6 rating agencies, market power of 53–9 ratings 41–3, 53–9, 60 definition 54 differences between rankings and 42–3 and evaluation portals 84–6 as objectivity generators 41 peer-to-peer 87–8 as social ushers 42 rationalization 5, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 105, 110, 154, 163 Raz, Joseph 31–2 reactive measurements 129–33 recommendation marketing 85 recruitment, e- 61 reference group theory 29 reputation 29, 39, 66, 74, 121 academic 75–6 cultivating good 47 and rankings 48, 49, 50, 52 rating of 87–8 signal value of 87 social media and like-based 93–8 reputation management 4, 50, 162–6 reputation scoring 87–8 research community 146 and evaluation system 146 and review system 146–7 ResearchGate 77 reviews 136 customer 82–6, 87, 88 doctor 92 high demand for 136 lecturers/tutors 90 performance 25, 149 pressure exerted by popular 147 Riesman, David 37 risks of quantification 129–40 loss of professional control 133–5 loss of time and energy 135–7 monoculture versus diversity 137–40 reactive measurements 129–33 Rosa, Hartmut 94, 173 Rose, Nikolas 112 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 28–9 running apps 107 Runtastic app 107 satisfaction surveys 82–4 Sauder, Michael 44, 139 Schimank, Uwe 134 Schirrmacher, Frank 152 Schmidt, Eric 147 schools and choice 118–19 evaluation of 90–1 league tables 46 and Pisa system 122, 145–6 scoring 7, 60, 61, 78–80 academic status markers 74–8 and assessment of criminal recidivism 62–3 credit 63–7 health 67–71 mobility value 71–4 pitfalls 79 screening 7, 60–1, 78–9 border controls 73–4 e-recruitment 61–2 function 60–1 smart cars 72 self-direction 105, 121, 143 self-documentation 153 and academic world 76–7 self-enhancement 3, 137 self-esteem 29, 37, 170 and comparison 29, 30 rankings and university staff 50–1 self-governance 19, 37, 105 self-image 37, 47, 50, 89 self-management 3, 20, 25 self-observation 25, 42 quantified 99–110 self-optimization 3, 19, 104, 109, 163 self-quantification/quantifiers 4, 13, 25, 101, 154–5, 156 self-reification 105 self-responsibility 25, 110 self-tracking 4, 7, 99, 100, 106, 109–10 collective body 104–6 as duty or social expectation 108 emotions provoked 109 health, exercise and mood 101–4 and motivation 106–10 problems with wearable technologies 103–4 running and fitness apps 68, 102–3, 104, 107 and sousveillance 153 as third-party tracking 154 self-worth 29, 36, 38, 47, 51, 170 and market value 67 Sesame Credit (China) 67 Shanghai ranking 47 ‘shared body’ 105 shared data 142, 152–3 Simmel, Georg 28 ‘small improvement argument’ 32 smart borders 74 smart cars 72 smart cities 21 smart homes 21 ‘social accounts’ 20 Social Credit System (China) 1, 166 social engineering 20 social management 20 social media 93–8, 153, 166 drivers of activity 93 and feedback 93–4 forms of connection 93 likes 93–5 and online disinhibition 153 and reputation building 95 resonance generated by 94 and running/fitness apps 107 social research 19–20 social security systems 19 social status see status social worth see worth socio-psychological rank theory 46 sociometrics/sociometers 2, 5, 36, 74, 141, 150–1 Sombart, Werner Modern Capitalism 15–16 sousveillance 153 sport 33 rise of world 35 Staab, Philipp 149–50 Stalder, Felix 124 Standard & Poor's 54, 56 statactivism 127 state as data manager 17–20 nomination power of the 112–15 statistics 14 origins of word 17 status and class 33 and comparison 29–30, 36–7 and credit scoring 67 inescapability from 170–4 and life satisfaction 30 seeking of 36 status anxiety 30 and rankings 46–7 status competition 26–39 status data 2, 80, 159, 161–2, 169, 174 functioning as symbolic data 8, 162 status fluidity 170–4 status insecurity 4 status miles 71–2 status sets 161–2 status symbols 158 status work 4, 36–7, 174 Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (France) 127 Streeck, Wolfgang 171–2 subprime crisis (2007) 57, 64 surveillance 8, 142, 152 interdependence of self- and external 153–5 and neoliberalism 23 workplace and technological 149–51 surveys, satisfaction 82–4 symbolic capital 174 status data as 8, 162 target setting 22 tariff models 152–3 technological surveillance, in the workplace 149–51 technologies of the self 25 tertium comparationis 32 Thomas theorem 59 Thompson, David C. 66 Times Higher Education ranking 47, 48, 53 tourism portals 85 tracking as double-edged sword 142 see also self-tracking trade relations 16 transnational expert systems 121–2 transparency 3, 91, 141–3, 144, 147 Transparency International 26 ‘transparent body’ 105 TripAdvisor 85 Trustpilot 86 Turkey 54 tutors evaluation of by students 89–90 Uber 156 űbercapital 163–4 UN Sustainable Development Goals 20 United Nations 122 university lecturers evaluation of 89–90 object of online reviews 90 university rankings 6, 7, 43, 47–53, 144, 175 valorization 5, 58, 124, 161 valuation 5–6 value registration 161 Vietnam War 131 visibilization, and the creation of difference 40–3 Webb, Jarrett 104 Weber, Max 15, 16, 154 Weiß, Manfred 119 Welch, Jack 155 ‘winner-take-all society’ 136 Wolf, Gary 99–100 Woolgar, Steve 34 workplace technological surveillance in the 149–51 World Bank 122 worth 5–6, 7, 11, 78–80, 170 assessments of 27 establishment of 160–2 orders of 11, 15, 29 self- 29, 36, 38, 47, 51, 67, 170 Young, Michael 161 The Rise of Meritocracy 23, 161 Zillien, Nicole 105 Zuckerberg, Mark 158 POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT Go to www.politybooks.com/eula to access Polity's ebook EULA.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Can the instability of the second modernity give way to a new synthesis: a third modernity that transcends the collision, offering a genuine path to a flourishing and effective life for the many, not just the few? What role will information capitalism play? V. A Third Modernity Apple once launched itself into that “abysmal gap,” and for a time it seemed that the company’s fusion of capitalism and the digital might set a new course toward a third modernity. The promise of an advocacy-oriented digital capitalism during the first decade of our century galvanized second-modernity populations around the world. New companies such as Google and Facebook appeared to bring the promise of the inversion to life in new domains of critical importance, rescuing information and people from the old institutional confines, enabling us to find what and whom we wanted, when and how we wanted to search or connect.

Long before the death of its legendary founder, Steve Jobs, its frequent abuses of user expectations raised questions about how well the corporation understood the deep structure and historic potential of its own creations. The dramatic success of Apple’s iPod and iTunes instilled internet users with a sense of optimism toward the new digital capitalism, but Apple never did seize the reins on developing the consistent, comprehensive social and institutional processes that would have elevated the iPod’s promise to an explicit market form, as Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan had once done. These developments reflect the simple truth that genuine economic reformation takes time and that the internet world, its investors and shareholders, were and are in a hurry.

History offers no control groups, and we cannot say whether with different leadership, more time, or other altered circumstances Apple might have perceived, elaborated, and institutionalized the jewel in its crown as Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan had done in another era. Nor is that opportunity forever lost—far from it. We may yet see the founding of a new synthesis for a third modernity in which a genuine inversion and its social compact are institutionalized as principles of a new rational digital capitalism aligned with a society of individuals and supported by democratic institutions. The fact that Schumpeter reckoned the time line for such institutionalization in decades or even centuries lingers as a critical commentary on our larger story. These developments are all the more dangerous because they cannot be reduced to known harms—monopoly, privacy—and therefore do not easily yield to known forms of combat.


pages: 205 words: 61,903

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail along with local journalism. But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment, the global poor, and the civilizational future their oppression portends. The manufacture of our computers and smartphones still depends on networks of slave labor. These practices are deeply entrenched. A company called Fairphone, founded to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism—let’s call it The Mindset—encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind. Maybe that’s been their objective all along. Perhaps this fatalist drive to rise above and separate from humanity is no more the result of runaway digital capitalism than its cause—a way of treating one another and the world that can be traced back to the sociopathic tendencies of empirical science, individualism, sexual domination, and perhaps even “progress” itself. Yet while tyrants since the time of Pharaoh and Alexander the Great may have sought to sit atop great civilizations and rule them from above, never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unlivable for everyone else.


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The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

But when the commons are sold or traded on Wall Street, the vast disparities between us, the peasants, and them, the lords, become more obvious and more objectionable.”13 Computer scientist turned techno-skeptic Jaron Lanier has staked out the most extreme position in relation to those he calls the “lords of the computing clouds,” arguing that the only way to counteract this feudal structure is to institute a system of nanopayments, a market mechanism by which individuals are rewarded for every bit of private information gleaned by the network (an interesting thought experiment, Lanier’s proposed solution may well lead to worse outcomes than the situation we have now, due to the twisted incentives it entails). New-media cheerleaders take a different view.14 Consider the poet laureate of digital capitalism, Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine and longtime technology commentator. It is not feudalism and exploitation that critics see, he argued in a widely circulated essay, but the emergence of a new cooperative ethos, a resurgence of collectivism—though not the kind your grandfather worried about.

Yet the same basic observation could be made of the remixer, the DJ, the mash-up artist, and the curator; they, too, are “social constructs” that cannot be disconnected from the economic and technological realities of our time. Remix culture may possess a rogue, transgressive aura, but its methods of appropriation and distribution are perfectly aligned with the profit-making logic of digital capitalism: originality doesn’t pay online, quick aggregation does. Curation, not creation, we are told, is the next “billion-dollar opportunity.”12 That the battles between new and old media have come to resemble Goliath versus Goliath is nowhere more visible than the debate over piracy, the epitome of copyright violation since it involves the distribution of movies, television shows, music, and books in their entirety.


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The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

I am grateful to the 30 interviewees who contributed their experience and ideas, and to all the people who volunteered to read an early draft of the book, providing useful comments: Maria Haberer, Graham Jones, Manfredi Mangano Francesco Screti, Lazaros Karavasilis, Antonio Calleja Lopez, Che Brandes-Tuka, Jasper Moriarty, Giorgios Venizelos, Felicia Panosoglu, Mawii Zothan, Asmita Jain, Patrick McCurdy, Vicente Rubio, Lorenzo Coretti, Julia Schönheit, Robin Piazzo, Francesco Screti, Enrico Padoan and Gavin Brown. My thanks also go to Alex Foti, who provided very insightful comments and advice on style for this book; to Javier Medina Lopez for discussions about the relationship between movement and parties in Spain; to Nick Srnicek and Mark Cotè for valuable discussion about digital capitalism and the logic of Big Data. Introduction On 18 May 2018, the registered members of the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) were convoked via email to participate in an important online consultation due to take place from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. A window was created on the main dashboard of the Rousseau participatory portal to vote on the ‘government contract’, the agreement that had long been negotiated with Lega, the right-wing populist party of Matteo Salvini.

Index Affordances: 5, 66, 68–9, 101 Agora voting: 119–20, 124–5 Alcibiades: 185 Alliance for Workers’ Liberty: 103 Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE): 65 Anticapitalism: 64 Appendino, Chiara: 10 Arab Spring: 168 Avaaz: 74, 169 Bauman, Zygmunt: 92 Benevolent dictator: 19, 159–60, 185 Berlusconi, Silvio: 33, 35, 150, 154 Bezos, Jeff: 19, 66 Big Data: 4, 46, 50 Big organising: 76 Blair, Tony: 35, 166 Bonaparte, Charles-Louis Napoléon: 110 Bonapartism: 110 Bond, Becky: 14, 157, 172 Bratton, Benjamin: 71–3 Breznev, Leonid: 148 Bureaucracy: 17–8, 31, 35, 40, 148, 179–80, 183, 191 As a problem in political parties: 40–1 Consultants: 18 Conflict between bureaucracy charismatic leadership: 148–9, 151 Elimination of: 75–6, 89, 96–7, 105, 183 Microbureaucracy: 97 Party in central office: 94, 95 Caesarism: 150–2 Callaghan, James: 148 Cambridge Analytica: 50, 56 Carmena, Manuela: 11 Casaleggio Associati: 9, 102, 116, 125, 141–2, 160 Casaleggio, Davide: 15, 61, 81, 89, 167 Casaleggio, Gianroberto: 9, 60–1, 94, 97, 116, 154, 160–1 Casas Moradas: 104 Castells Manuel: 23, 146 Clinton, Hillary: 54, 158 Colau, Ada (mayor of Barcelona): 11 Collaborative policy development: 17, 107, 130–3, 141, 180 Comisión de Garantias (guarantee committee, Podemos): 136 Complutense University of Madrid: 11, 155 Computer Chaos Club (Germany): 124 Connected outsiders: 20, 43–4, 50–1, 55, 177 Income: 53–4 Young vote: 52 Education: 53 Representatives’ sociodemographics: 54 Conservative Party (UK): 31 Considerant, Victor: 126 Consul (decision-making software): 108, 115, 120–2 Corbyn, Jeremy: 12, 151 Dalton, Richard: 35 Decidim: 108, 124 Deliveroo: 13, 49, 50 De Tocqueville, Alexis: 27 Dean, Howard: 13 Dean, Jodi: 26 Decision-making platforms: 105–15 Della Volpe, Galvano: 28 Democracy Deliberative democracy: 38, 60, 91, 108, 109–11, 114, 123–4, 127 Direct democracy: 61, 142, 180 Democracy quality: 40, 128, 186 Demands for “real democracy”: 59 Democratic centralism: 41 Conditions for: 129 Criticism of existing: 58–9 Criticism of: 110 Intraparty: 13 OMOV (one man, one vote system): 102 Participatory budgeting: 60 Participatory democracy: 3, 17 DemocracyOS: 108 Democrazia Proletaria (Proletarian Democracy): 26 Di Battista, Alessandro: 83, 100, 135, 157 Di Maio, Luigi: 1–3, 135, 157, 181 Digital democracy: External validation: 125 Discussion of direct legislation: 110 Management of online decision-making: 127–30, 191 Online democracy: 60 Need for guarantee rules: 143 Participatory legislation: 17 Reactive democracy: 18, 127, 163, 185–6 Thresholds: 121, 124 Digital capitalism: 46–7, 93 Digital disruption: 18 Economic rise: 47, 49 Gig economy: 50 Digital parties (also platform parties): 3–5, 14, 18–9 As cloud parties: 79 As forum parties: 79 As start-up parties: 80 Conflicts between national leadership and local groups: 102 Data gathering: 69, 73–4 Platform as policy platform: 77, 189 Free labour: 18, 69, 75, 178, 191 Free membership: 17, 69 Free registration: 74 History: 7–10 Low marginal costs of communication: 5, 48 Low staff numbers: 49 Similarities with platform companies: 5 Similarities with television party: 78 Digital platforms: 69 Architecture: 115–6 Definitions: 69 Hierarchies: 73 Reintermediation: 71 Standardisation: 71 Supposed neutrality: 72 Digital revolution: 44–6, 48 And Fordism: 31 As a cleavage: 45–7 Comparison with industrial revolution: 26, 28, 30–1, 33, 44–7, 49, 51, 54 Digital rights: 55–7 Privacy: 55 Digital surveillance: 55 Reform of copyright: 56 Digital Bill of rights (UK): 58 Marco Civil da Internet (Brazil): 58 Direct Connect (file-sharing hub): 8 Direttorio (M5S Directorate): 135 Discorsi all’umanità: 150, 154 Disintermediation: 66, 70, 71, 75–6, 109 Distributed centralisation: 17, 72, 76, 145, 183 Distributed organising: 14, 75, 182 Dryzek, John S.: 109 Dunbar number: 98 Duverger, Maurice: 31, 39–4, 75, 165 Distinction between direct and indirect party: 41 Theory of party structure: 40 Dyer-Whiteford, Nick: 49 Echenique, Pablo: 136 Economic crisis: 20, 27, 43, 51–3, 145–6 Eggers, David: 94 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: 24 Encadrement: 163, 165, 174 Engström, Christian (Pirate Party MEP): 55 Environmental movements: 25, 32, 146 Erdogan, Tayyip: 110 Errejón, Iñigo: 11, 138, 149, 160–1 Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD): 65, 135 Exley, Zack: 14, 157, 172 FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google): 49–50, Facebook: 2–4, 12–3, 43, 47, 49, 56, 66, 68–74, 84, 144, 156, 163, 169 Facebook live: 3 Newsfeed algorithm: 106 Falkvinge, Rick: 8, 56, 156, 159, 173, 181 Feminist movements: 25, 145 Fico, Roberto (president of the Italian lower chamber): 3, 95, 100, 135 Forza Italia (Italy): 33, 35, 52 Foti, Alex: 50 France Insoumise: 4, 12, 74, 81, 83, 86, 87, 91, 93, 96–9, 108, 121–2, 132–3, 139, 144, 158–9, 166–70, Avenir en Commun electoral programme: 122, 132 Groupes d’appui (support groups): 97–9 Friedman, Milton: 64 Friedman, Thomas L.: 23 Galapagar case: 138–9 Game of Thrones: 156 Ghibellines: 28 Gillespie, Tarleton: 69 Gramsci, Antonio: 7, 27, 37–8, 41, 43–4, 75, 77, 105, 143, 164 Theory of party structure: 38–9, 164 On the passivity of the mass: 147 On leadership: 151–2, Great Recession: 4, 27, 46, 168, Green Party: 10, 16, 26, 27 Basisdemokratie (grassroots democracy): 16 Grillo, Beppe: 2–3, 9, 43, 59–60, 74–5, 80, 83, 89, 95, 100–1, 135, 141, 153, 154–5, 158–60, 181 theatre shows: 154 Guelphs: 28 Guevara, Che: 25, 26, 148 House of Cards: 25 Hyperleader: 17, 144–62 And reactive democracy: 185 As benevolent dictator: 186 Characteristics: 153–5 Relationship with advisors: 159–60 Reputation: 154 Iglesias Turrion, Pablo: 11, 86, 94, 136, 138–9, 145, 149–50, 151, 153, 155–6, 158–60, 181 Italia a 5 Stelle (Five star movement annual gathering): 1–3 Izquierda Unida (IU): 136 Julius Caesar: 19, 28, 150, 152, 159, 161 Kant, Immanuel: 184 Karpf, David: 13, 169 Katz, Richard: 7, 30, 32, 59, 99 Kautsky, Karl: 110 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald: 33 Kirchheimer, Otto: 7, 32 Klug, Adam: 12, 171 La Tuerka: 150, 156 Labour Party: 12, 14, 29, 31, 35, 41, 52, 54, 107–8, 111, 148, 151, 156, 165, 168, 177 Lansman, Jon: 12, 103, Lavapies (neighbourhood in Madrid): 94 Leadership: 146–8 Charismatic leadership: 148–9 Leaderlessness: 77, 146, 181, 183, 187 Legal-rational: 147 Routinisation of charisma: 188 Liberalism: 28 Linux: 19, 82, 86, 159 Liquid Feedback: 4, 16, 61, 112–4, 121, 124 Loomio: 108, 112, 114–5 Machiavelli, Niccolò: 151, 186 Macron, Emmanuel: 13, 108, 140 Madison, James: 24 Mair, Peter: 7, 30, 32, 59, 99 Marx, Karl: 68, 93 May’s law: 124, 170 Mélenchon, Jean-Luc: 12, 52, 53, 86–8, 93, 107, 122, 132, 144–5, 156–9 Michels, Robert: 7, 16, 27, 30–1, 36–9, 41, 103, 110, 140, 142, 147, 152–3, 175, 179 Iron law of oligarchy: 36–7 Theory of party structure: 39 Microbureaucracy: 97 Mill, John Stuart: 24 Momentum: 26, 73, 80, 83, 87, 96, 102–3, 107, 166, 171–2 Monedero, Juan Carlos: 11 Montero, Irene: 138–9, 158 Morgan, Gareth: 67 MoVimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement): 1–5, 7, 9–19, 26, 43, 52–4, 57, 60–4, 66, 73–4, 77, 80–1, 83, 86–90, 93, 95–7, 99, 100–2, 105, 107–8, 112, 115–7, 119–20, 124, Meetup groups: 97, 99–102 Referendums for the expulsion of members: 135 Salary restitution programme: 57 Movimento Sociale Italiano (rightwing party in Italy): 2 NationBuilder (political campaigning app): 12, 107, 121, 124 Nazism: 24 Nielsen, Jakob: 91 Law of participation: 91 Nixon, Richard: 33 Nvotes: 108, 119 Obama, Barack: 11, 13 Olivetti, Adriano: 88–9, 154 Optimates: 28 Organisation: 67 Delegation: 17 Elimination of middlemen: 15, 183 Integration of technology: 13 Iron law of oligarchy: 36–7, 185 Lean management: 15 Organisational fragility: 187 Netroots organisations: 13 Ostrogorski, Moisei: 24, 27, 31, 104, Paine, Thomas: 111 Panebianco, Angelo: 7, 27, 32, 34–5 Parlamentarie (M5S online primaries): 10 Parliament et Citoyens (French parliament digital democracy project): 107 Parsons, Talcott: 45 Participa (Podemos participatory portal): 12, 73, 132 Participation And anti-party suspicion: 85–8 As an idea in contemporary culture: 84 And distrust towards bureaucracy: 150 And lack of party office: 96 Aristocratic tendencies: 164, 173 Difference between militant and sympathiser: 174 Habitueés of meetings: 103 Individualisation of participation: 102–3, 188 In parties’ discourse: 82–4 Lurking supporters: 174 Participationism: 81–9, 191 Participation aristocracy: 91 Participation divide: 91 Participatory representation: 123 Passive membership: 175 Superbase: 17, 152, 162–72 Partido de la Red (Party of the Net, Argentina): 8 Partido Popular (Popular Party): 11 Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE): 11, 14, 108, 166, 190 Partido X (X Party, also known as the Party of the Future, Spain): 8 Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party): 31, 35, 42, 92, 93, 95 Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, Italy): 10, 35, 52–3, 111 Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party, PSI): 153 Pericles: 185 Pirate Bay (file sharing server): 8, 56, 58, 166 Pirate Parties: 4, 7–9, 12–3, 16, 26, 48, 50, 52, 54–8, 61–2, 64, 66, 73, 77, 82, 86, 88, 93, 99, 105, 107, 112, 115, 159, 166, 172, 174, 177, 178, 180–1 Piratar (Iceland): 8 Pirate Party International (PPI): 8 Piratenpartei (Germany): 8, 114 Piratpartiet (Sweden): 8, 55, 166, 167 Česká pirátská strana (Czech Pirate Party): 8 Place Fear of, terror loci: 93, 95 Organisational principle of: 42 Platformisation: 14, 67, 69, 73, 76–7, 179, 183–4, 187, Podemos: 4, 7, 9, 11–4, 16, 19, 26, 52–5, 57, 61–3, 65–6, 69, 73, 81, 86–8, 93–8, 104–5, 107–8, 112, 115, 119–21, 123–5, 131–2, 136–43, 149–51, 153, 155–60, 166–70, 173–4, 177, 180–1, 193 Circles (Podemos’ local groups): 97–8, 115, 132 Citizens’ Council (Podemos’ central committee): 11, 96, 131, 136 Iniciativas Ciudadanas and Popular Podemos (Podemos Citizens’ and Popular initiatives): 121, 131 Plaza Podemos: 16, 86, 120, 131 Political Parties: Astroturf parties: 26 Definitions of: 27–9 Cadres: 18, 161, 179, 183 Catchall: 33 Integration: 182 Electoral/professional parties: 33 Party systems: 26 Political careers: 99 Mass parties: 30–2 Movement parties: 25 New Left: 27 Party sections, cells: 97–8 Passivity of the mass: 186 Patronage parties: 28 Return of: 25–8 Suspicion towards: 22–4 Television parties: 33–6 Populares (Party in ancient Rome): 28 Populism: 1, 4, 9, 10, 12, 15, 27, 39, 44 Poulantzas, Nicos: 27 Power struggles: 161, Precariat: 50 Proceduralism: 188, 189, Protest movements: 1968: 26 2011: 36 Environmentalist: 25, 146 Feminist: 25, 146 Raggi, Virginia: 10 Rajoy, Mariano: 138 Reduction of membership of traditional parties: 165 Rees, Emma: 12, 103 Renewable energy: 62–3 Republican Party: 28 Republique En Marche (REM, Macron’s movement): 108 Revelli, Marco: 31–2 Rittinghausen, Moritz Robespierre Rokkan, Stein: 45 Role as diffusors of messages: 176 Rousseau (5 Star Movement decision-making system): 2, 10–11, 116–7 Lex functions: 117, 131 Lex Iscritti: 117 Hacker attacks: 119 Villaggio Rousseau: 2 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: 37 Salvini, Matteo: 1, 13 Sanchez, Pedro: 11 Sanders, Bernard (US senator and presidential primary candidate in 2016): 13 Scarrow, Susan: 28, 128–9 Schneider, James: 12 Schumpeter, Joseph: 38 Scudo della Rete (Shield of the Net): 57 Security Silicon Valley: 15 Signup process: 168–9 Skocpol, Theda: 42 Snowden, Edward: 50 Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD): 14 Srnicek, Nick: 71 Stalinism: 24 Stallman, Richard (open source activist): 116, 124 Super-volunteer: 171–3 Teatro Smeraldo, Milan: 9 Telegram: 4 The Apprentice: 156 TOR (The onion router): 56 Tormey, Simon: 60 Torvalds, Linus: 159 Transparency: 57 Trump, Donald: 6, 35 Tufekci, Zeynep: 187 Twitter: 4, 124 UK Independence Party (UKIP): 65 Universal basic income: 63, 131 Universal basic services: 64 V for Vendetta (film): 3 Vaffanculo Day (literally ‘Fuck Off Day’, M5S protest in 2007): 9 Veltroni, Walter: 93 Von Hayek, Friedrich: 25 Von Treitsche, Heinrich: 24 Wales, Jimmy: 159 Washington, George Weber, Max: 7, 27–9., 31, 37–8, 40, 147, 151, 185 Weil, Simone (Christian anarchist); WhatsApp: 4 Whigs (Liberal party, UK): 22 Wikipartido (Wikiparty, Mexico): 8 Wikipedia: 19, 82, 86, 91, 159 World Social Forum: 25 Yang, Guobin: 44 Your Priorities: 108 Zeming, Jang: 148 Zuckerberg, Mark: 63, 66, 158


Rogue States by Noam Chomsky

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edward Snowden, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, land reform, liberation theology, Mahbub ul Haq, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, oil shock, precautionary principle, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Tobin tax, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (McGraw-Hill, 1976); Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (fifth ed., Beacon, 1997). 31. Bruce Knecht, “Magazine Advertisers Demand Prior Notice of ‘Offensive’ Articles,” WSJ, April 30, 1997. 32. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism (MIT Press, 1999). 33. Preston, in Preston et al., Hope and Folly. 34. Herbert Schiller, Information Inequality: The Deepening Social Crisis in America (Routledge, 1996); Edward Herman and Robert McChesney, The Global Media (Cassell, 1997); Schiller, Digital Capitalism; McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1999). 35. Marshall Clark, “Cleansing the Earth,” Inside Indonesia, Oct.-Dcc. 1998. MAI, see my Profit Over People. 10.


pages: 116 words: 31,356

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

‘There Are Probably Way More People in the “Gig Economy” Than We Realize’. Fusion. Accessed 24 March. http://fusion.net/story/173244/there-are-probably-way-more-people-in-the-gig-economy-than-we-realize (accessed 29 May 2016). Wittel, Andreas. 2016. ‘Digital Marx: Toward a Political Economy of Distributed Media’. In Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism, edited by Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco, pp. 68–104. Leiden: Brill. World Bank. 2016. ‘World Development Reports, 2016: Digital Dividends’. Washington, DC. http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2016 (accessed 29 May 2016). World Economic Forum. 2015. ‘Industrial Internet of Things: Unleashing the Potential of Connected Products and Services’.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy and the demise of local retail. But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and the global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labour. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Matthew Crain, “The Revolution Will Be Commercialized: Finance, Public Policy, and the Construction of Internet Advertising in the 1990s,” PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013. 45. S. Derek Turner, “The Internet,” in Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age (Washington, DC: Free Press, 2009), 12, www.freepress.net/files/changing_media.pdf. 46. Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 128. 47. The celebratory and largely fatuous coverage of the Internet continues in what remains of the news media to this day. In a 2012 report for the Columbia Journalism Review, Michael Massing noted that “reporters breathlessly chronicle the fortunes, mansions, and attire of the digerati.”

(New York: John Day, 1934). 102. Joseph Turow, The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 40–41. For a superior discussion of the entire debate over commercializing the Internet in the 1990s, see Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 103. Turow, Daily You, 49. 104. Ibid., 57–63. 105. See Lauar J. Gurak, Cyberliteracy: Navigating the Internet with Awareness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Reg Whitaker, The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality (New York: The New Press, 1999). 106.


pages: 172 words: 50,777

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future by Julia Hobsbawm

8-hour work day, Airbnb, augmented reality, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cal Newport, call centre, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Graeber, death from overwork, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, digital nomad, driverless car, emotional labour, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Greensill Capital, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Ocado, pensions crisis, remote working, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, social distancing, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Upton Sinclair, WeWork, work culture

(HarperCollins, 2015 [1968]) Smil, Vaclav, Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities (MIT Press, 2020) Suzman, James, Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time (Bloomsbury, 2021) Usher, Neil, The Elemental Workplace (LID Publishing, 2018) Wajcman, Judy, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2015) Wallman, James, Time and How to Spend It: The 7 Rules for Richer, Happier Days (W. H. Allen, 2019) Chapter 2: Shift 2: Worker Beings Armstrong, Leah, and Felice McDowell (eds), Fashioning Professionals: Identity and Representation at Work in the Creative Industries (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) Auerbach, Annie, Flex: Reinventing Work for a Smarter, Happier Life (HQ, 2021) D’Souza, Steven, and Diana Renner, Not Knowing: The Art of Turning Uncertainty into Opportunity (LID Publishing, 2014) Duffy, Bobby, Generations: Does When You’re Born Shape Who You Are?


pages: 196 words: 54,339

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

The blockchain replaces the need for central authorities such as banks by letting everyone on a network authenticate their transactions with computer encryption. It may disintermediate exploitative financial institutions but it doesn’t help rehumanize the economy, or reestablish the trust, cohesion, and ethos of mutual aid that was undermined by digital capitalism. It simply substitutes for trust in a different way: using the energy costs of blockchain mining as a security measure against counterfeiting or other false claims. (The computer power needed to create one bitcoin consumes at least as much electricity as the average American household burns through in two years.)


pages: 527 words: 147,690

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection by Jacob Silverman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, Brian Krebs, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, context collapse, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake it until you make it, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, game design, global village, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, life extension, lifelogging, lock screen, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, Minecraft, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, payday loans, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, pre–internet, price discrimination, price stability, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, real-name policy, recommendation engine, rent control, rent stabilization, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social intelligence, social web, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yottabyte, you are the product, Zipcar

.† Instantaneous global communication has failed to stop war, genocide, or famine; women remain second-class citizens in large parts of the world; authoritarian propaganda travels as easily online as human rights reports (in some countries, more easily); smartphones have become the preeminent surveillance tool for corporations and governments alike. While many once foresaw digital capitalism as the harbinger of an era of widespread prosperity, legacy industries such as newspapers have crumbled, and income inequality is now higher than ever—particularly in San Francisco, home to many technology-industry employees who are shuttled daily on private buses to and from massive suburban campuses, where they’re showered with amenities and services and never have to interact with residents of the surrounding communities.

At its furthest reaches, the informational appetite epitomizes the idea that we can know one another and ourselves through data alone. It becomes a metaphysic. Facebook’s Graph Search, arguably the first Big Data–like tool available to a broad, nonexpert audience, shows “how readily what we ‘like’ gets translated into who we are.” Zuckerberg is only one exponent of what has become a folkway in the age of digital capitalism. Ever connected, perhaps fearing disconnection itself more than the fear of missing out, we live the informational appetite. We have internalized and institutionalized it by hoarding photos we’ll never organize, much less look at again; by tracking ourselves relentlessly; by feeling a peculiar anxiety whenever we find ourselves without a cell phone signal.


pages: 218 words: 62,889

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

Indeed, the experience of junk bonds, securitization or credit derivatives suggests that it is never the invention of a specific financial product that endows the innovator with a degree of power and profit, but the wider institutionalization of this product in the infrastructure of the new market, a regulatory niche and an accommodating political-economic system. And that is something, we believe, regulators should begin to take on board. As this book goes to press, economies around the world are gripped by the advance of artificial intelligence (AI) and a spate of new financial technologies. The emergence of data as the most valuable asset in the digital capitalism of the twenty-first century, as well as tighter regulation of the traditional financial sector, is paving the way for a new means of doing the business of finance. Many of these innovations are celebrated in the market and beyond. Blockchain – a distributed ledger technology underpinning the drive – is heralded as the radically new way to connect people across various sectors and walks of life.


pages: 247 words: 63,208

The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance by Jim Whitehurst

Airbnb, behavioural economics, cloud computing, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google Hangouts, Infrastructure as a Service, job satisfaction, Kaizen: continuous improvement, market design, meritocracy, Network effects, new economy, place-making, platform as a service, post-materialism, profit motive, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh

Sloane, Paul, ed. A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing. Philadelphia: Kogan Page Limited, 2011. Stack, Jack, with Bo Burlingham. The Great Game of Business. New York: Crown Business, 2013. Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor, 2005. Tapscott, Don, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowy. Digital Capital. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000. Tapscott, Don, and David Ticoll. The Naked Corporation. New York: Penguin, 2003. Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics. New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2008. ——— . Macrowikinomics. New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2010. Thompson, Kenneth R., Ramon L.


pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by Ronald Purser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, British Empire, capitalist realism, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, impulse control, job satisfaction, liberation theology, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, neoliberal agenda, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, placebo effect, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, publication bias, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, source of truth, stealth mode startup, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, work culture

For Kabat-Zinn, the miracle of mindfulness is that we can “drop in” (a phrase he is very fond of using) to “being” and simply be present. Dwelling in this non-discursive state is equated to a form of spiritual liberation. MBSR enthusiasts consider this shift to be a countercultural force, as the practice provides a peaceful respite from the relentless pressures and constant distractions of digital capitalism. Although there is clearly therapeutic value in stepping — however temporarily — out of the stream of what Kabat-Zinn calls “A.D.D.,” mindfulness over-romanticizes “being.” We are told it appeals to Westerners because we have (supposedly) lost touch with experience; our lives have become too stressful and our concerns too overwhelming to appreciate the simple pleasures of being alive.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

This was, to be fair, not a terribly original idea. Around that time, all sorts of other “business-to-business” marketplaces, with names such as Ariba, VerticalNet, and CommerceOne (and lots of “e” prefixes from eMetals to eTextiles), were starting up in industries from cars to plastics. Driven by the dream of “frictionless digital capitalism,” as Bill Gates’s book The Road Ahead put it at the time, they were all going to revolutionize supply-chain management. Some sought to use a reverse-auction model like eBay to drive prices down. Others were consortia of big buyers in an industry designed to gang together to achieve Wal-Mart–like purchasing power (something that allowed me to use the term polyopsony—a monopoly of many buyers—for the first time in The Economist, as far as I know, which is something that I am inexplicably proud of).


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

New York: Sara Crichton Books, 2013. Waddell, Kaveh. “Why Bosses Can Track Their Employees 24/7.” Atlantic, January 6, 2017. Wagner, Kurt. “Facebook to Raise Pay for Thousands of Contract Workers, Including Content Moderators.” Bloomberg, May 13, 2019. Wajcman, Judy. Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Wang, Maya. “China’s Chilling ‘Social Credit’ Blacklist.” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2017. Waters, Richard, Rochelle Toplensky, and Aliya Ram. “Brussels’ €2.4bn Fine Could Lead to Damages Cases and Probes in Other Areas of Search.” Financial Times, June 28, 2017.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

This is an age so destructively unthinkable, in fact, that Clayton Christensen’s theory of the “Innovator’s Dilemma,” which suggests an orderly cycle of disruptors, each replacing the previous economic incumbent, now has itself been blown up by an even more disruptive theory of early-twenty-first-century digital capitalism. Christensen’s ideas have themselves been reinvented by the bestselling business writers Larry Downes and Paul F. Nunes, who’ve replaced the “Innovator’s Dilemma” with the much bleaker “Innovator’s Disaster.” “Nearly everything you think you know about strategy and innovation is wrong,” Downes and Nunes warn about today’s radically disruptive economy.59 In their 2014 book, Big Bang Disruption,60 they describe an economy in which disruption is devastating rather than creative.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

More than any other single individual in the world today, Europe’s antitrust chief is standing up to the business model and business practices of what, you’ll remember, the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo calls the “Frightful Five”—the dominant winner-take-all tech companies whose collective $2.3 trillion valuation makes up an astonishing 14 percent of the entire $16.5 trillion GDP of the twenty-eight members of the European Union. According to the Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens, Margrethe Vestager is the woman who is saving digital capitalism from the digital capitalists. The problem with free market capitalism, digital or otherwise, Stephens says, is its natural and perhaps even inevitable tendency toward winner-take-all monopolies. “Unconstrained, enterprise curdles into monopoly, innovation into rent-seeking,” Stephens argues.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

The human cost of Amazon’s singular vision of commerce’s digital future does not come from some sadistic desire of Jeff Bezos to inflict pain on workers, suppliers, and others for his own pleasure. It is, rather, the necessary consequence of his libertarian worldview and the particular form of digital capitalism it justifies, which is that commerce is a zero-sum game. In that game there are either winners or losers. There is no sharing. No compromise. No middle ground. Everything Amazon does, from click to delivery, positions it to end up on the winning side, whatever the cost. The alternative this presents to anyone wishing to do commerce online—be it an individual entrepreneur looking to sell a product, an established retail store, like Surf Ontario, trying to diversify its customer base, or a large global brand like Nike—is pretty stark.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

There is money to be made in analog, whether you open a small record store or a large watch factory. For all the press around the success of Silicon Valley, the vast majority of our economy is still overwhelmingly analog, and these businesses more broadly benefit our society than those of more concentrated digital capital. As the business world increasingly focuses on digital, companies and individuals who can use analog in new and novel ways will increasingly stand out and succeed. Human input will become more valuable, and analog tools and practices–from note taking on whiteboards to translating digital experiences into the real world (such as retail stores)—will separate the leading businesses from the rest of the pack.


pages: 304 words: 96,930

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

The promise of celebrity sightings and free coffee makes for effective bait, but the spectators also came to celebrate the profits they had reaped from their investment in Starbucks — in just the last two years, the company’s shares had doubled in value, and they were soaring again even as Schultz spoke. One might think that after fifteen years of the company’s explosive growth, the onlookers would be a bit bored with their double-digit capital gains. But no; when Schultz reminded everyone that a $10,000 investment in Starbucks in 1992 would be worth nearly $650,000 that day, the audience stoked itself into a sort of financial rapture. Given this euphoric response, Schultz could have just lobbed some more figures at the crowd and relied on the mystery guest to provide the pizzazz.


pages: 268 words: 109,447

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. London: Granada. Saul, John Ralston. 1992. Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. New York: Vintage Books. Schank, Roger C., and Kenneth Colby, eds. 1973. Computer Models of Thought and Language. San Francisco: Freeman. Schiller, Dan. 2000. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Schreibman, Susan, Ray G. Siemens, and John Unsworth, eds. 2001. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Scheutz, Matthias, ed. 2002. Computationalism: New Directions. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.


pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

were planning to scoop Google preceded the deal, and the eventual purchase, valued at twenty times DoubleClick’s annual revenue, achieved what we could indulgently call a coup “d’ata” for Google. With this announcement, data itself had become a business, maybe even the central commodity for digital capital.54 Prior to the deal, Google had access only to my email and search history. Now, blessed by DoubleClick’s extensive network, Google also would know which pages I visited, how often I visited them, how long I stayed on those pages when I did, and which pages I went to before and after visiting a certain site.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Beyond the efficiency gains, Silicon Valley would stand to profit from such a system. By developing a proprietary brain-computer network that renders human cogitation fully machine-readable, the tech industry would be able to transmit, store, parse, and hence to own, the entirety of our thoughts. “Industrial capitalism privatized the means of production,” Davies observed. “Digital capitalism seeks to privatize the means of communication.” That’s already happening. In digitizing human expression, the protocols of social networks are beginning to alter speech to make it more amenable to machine transmission and interpretation. Think of Like buttons, or other forms of online communication that involve, say, tapping an icon or clicking a checkbox or selecting an option from a drop-down menu.


pages: 481 words: 125,946

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

The debate about how to think about thinking machines tends to gravitate toward our cortical and limbic brains. The cortex allows us to more accurately assess the cost/benefit that AI carries, regarding things like the relative costs to business of human versus robot labor and the relative value of human versus digital capital, as well as concerns about bioethics, privacy, and national security. It also enables us to plan, attract more and better funding for research and development, and define our public-policy priorities. In parallel, our limbic brain helps us take precautions and respond with fear or excitement toward the risks or opportunities of developing AI.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Taken together, this is evidence that a graph-shaped information economy can support a middle class—as opposed to the winner-take-all outcome that emerges in tree-shaped economies. A monetized version of a many-to-many network could create an organic path to middle-class wealth that would be better than the ad hoc mountain of levees that sustained middle classes in pre-digital capitalism. CHAPTER 21 Some First Principles Provenance The foundational idea of humanistic computing is that provenance is valuable. Information is people in disguise, and people ought to be paid for value they contribute that can be sent or stored on a digital network. The primary distinguishing feature of humanistic computing is therefore two-way linking, just as networking and hypermedia might have possessed anyway, had the original ideas from Ted Nelson and other early pioneers prevailed.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

ALSO BY Don Tapscott Paradigm Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology (1993) Coauthor, Art Caston The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence (1995) Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (1997) Who Knows: Safeguarding Your Privacy in a Networked World (1997) Coauthor, Ann Cavoukian Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs (2000) Coauthors, David Ticoll and Alex Lowy The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business (2003) Coauthor, David Ticoll Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006) Coauthor, Anthony D. Williams Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing the World (2008) Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet (2010) Coauthor, Anthony D.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Both a vast subterranean Cold War bunker system beneath an Alpine mountain in Switzerland and an ex-anti-aircraft artillery installation built off the coast of Essex in England during World War II have recently been redeveloped as ultra-secure data centres.40 Meanwhile, the Strategic Data Services Group in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have taken over two former Atlas intercontinental nuclear missile silos near the city, comprising 1.2 million cubic feet of usable space. These have been converted into twenty-two-floor installations with a hundred servers placed on each floor. They market their services by arguing that deep installations, ‘built to withstand most natural disasters and the perils of mankind’, offer radical security for the backup data of digital capitalism in a world of routine infrastructure collapses, power outages and infrastructural terror attacks.41 Bunker Tourism As the surface environments of many cities become burnished with the identikit accoutrements of stage-managed spectacles, homogenised corporate consumption and gentrified stone-blasted ‘heritage’, so, as part of the wider growth of so-called ‘dark tourism’,42 urban tourists now flock in increasing numbers to subterranean ‘shadow architectures’ of bunkers, tunnels and subterranean spaces packaged as ‘authentic’ tourist sites.43 ‘Bunkers throughout the world have become ready-made tourist attractions since the end of the Cold War’, cultural theorist John Beck writes.


Virtual Competition by Ariel Ezrachi, Maurice E. Stucke

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Arthur D. Levinson, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, cloud computing, collaborative economy, commoditize, confounding variable, corporate governance, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, deep learning, demand response, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, electricity market, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental economics, Firefox, framing effect, Google Chrome, independent contractor, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, light touch regulation, linked data, loss aversion, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, Milgram experiment, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, nowcasting, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, prediction markets, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search costs, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, yield management

Carstensen, “The Content of the Hollow Core of Antitrust: The Chicago Board of Trade Case and the Meaning of the ‘Rule of Reason’ in Restraint of Trade Analysis,” Research in Law and Economics 15 (1992): 1, 4. 39. Adam Candeub, “Behavioral Economics, Internet Search, and Antitrust,” MSU Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12-03 (2014), http://ssrn.com/abstract =2414179. 40. Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); see also Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration—A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 7 • Tacit Collusion on Steroids: The Predictable Agent 1. Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 509 U.S. 209 (1993); R.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

rules against misinformation: Craig Silverman and Ryan Mac, “Facebook Fired an Employee Who Collected Evidence of Right-Wing Pages Getting Preferential Treatment,” BuzzFeed, August 6, 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-zuckerberg-what-if-trump-disputes-election-results; Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman, “ ‘Mark Changed the Rules’: How Facebook Went East on Alex Jones and Other Right-Wing Figures,” BuzzFeed, February 22, 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/mark-zuckerberg-joel-kaplan-facebook-alex-jones; Sarah Frier and Kurt Wagner, “Facebook Needs Trump Even More Than Trump Needs Facebook,” Bloomberg, September 17, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-09-17/facebook-and-mark-zuckerberg-need-trump-even-more-than-trump-needs-facebook?sref=4ZgkJ7cZ CHAPTER TWENTY: BACK TO THE FUTURE handful of well-known favorites: Tim Schneider, “How Artist Simon Denny Is Turning Board Games into Hilarious Critiques of Digital Capitalism,” Artnet, April 2, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/banksy-guest-stars-sort-of-on-the-latest-episode-of-hbos-silicon-valley-1258157. Thiel’s likeness appeared: Kristen Brown, “Of Course Peter Thiel Is a Green-Skinned Villain in This Board Game,” Gizmodo, January 18, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/of-course-peter-thiel-is-a-green-skinned-villain-in-thi-1821514712.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

THE DIGITAL IDENTITY BUFFET Science fiction writers who extrapolate from current technology to pre-imagine scientific breakthroughs paint a large arc of human-technology co-evolution in which our present phase of multiplying identities through digital personae graduates to virtual avatars autonomously acting on our behalf in a parallel but integrated cyber universe and eventually a fusion of four-dimensional capabilities with full-sensory haptic experiences allowing us to teleport our minds to distant physical spaces without changing location. Then we arrive at the Matrix. While the “death of distance” has been proclaimed for decades, today’s combination of urbanization and transportation, communication and digitization, capital markets and supply chains, together make a powerful case against geographic determinism. Each infrastructure investment and technological innovation advances our connected destiny. Indeed, the Internet is not merely a conduit for simple signals but the repository of complex data. It is becoming, as many scientists have analogized, something of a “global brain.”


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Might this principle even reverse the logic of labor globalization? In a recent paper, economists Laura Tyson and Michael Spence point out that for the last several decades, the logic of globalization was that manufacturing moved toward the lowest-cost sources of labor. But now, they note, as “digital-capital-intensive technologies are substituting for humans in the routine labor-intensive parts of manufacturing supply chains . . . and digital technologies make manufacturing mobile with little or no cost penalty, physical manufacturing activity will move toward market demand rather than toward labor, because there are efficiencies to be gained from proximity to the market.”


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

MACROWIKINOMICS ALSO FROM DON TAPSCOTT AND ANTHONY D. WILLIAMS Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything OTHER BOOKS BY DON TAPSCOTT Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business (with David Ticoll) Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs (with David Ticoll and Alex Lowy) Creating Value in the Network Economy Blueprint to the Digital Economy: Creating Wealth in the Era of E-Business (with David Ticoll and Alex Lowy) Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation Who Knows: Safeguarding Your Privacy in a Networked World (with Ann Cavoukian) The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence Paradigm Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology (with Art Caston) Planning for Integrated Office Systems: A Strategic Approach (with Del Henderson and Morley Greenberg) Office Automation: A User-Driven Method (with Del Henderson and Morley Greenberg) MACROWIKINOMICS Rebooting Business and the World Don Tapscott and Anthony D.


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

Economist, ‘The London Stock Exchange Is Thriving Despite Brexit’, 9 March 2019. 16. One zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes, or 1021 bytes. IDC, ‘The Digital Universe of Opportunities: Rich Data and the Increasing Value of the Internet of Things’, April 2014, at emc.com. 17. Lanchester, ‘You Are the Product’. On the surveillance business of contemporary digital capitalism more broadly, see S. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (London: Profile, 2019). 18. ‘Datafication’ is the term used by Jathan Sadowski in his ‘When Data Is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction’, Big Data & Society, doi: 10.1177/2053951718820549. 19. Economist, ‘Data Is Giving Rise to a New Economy’, 6 May 2017. 20.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

(eds) (1990) Technological Change and Employment Innovation in the German Economy, Berlin: Walter De Gruyter. Schiatarella, R. (1984) Mercato di Lavoro e struttura produttiva, Milan: Franco Angeli. Schiffer, Jonathan (1983) Anatomy of a Laissez-faire Government: the Hong Kong Growth Model Reconsidered, Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Centre for Asian Studies. Schiller, Dan (1999) Digital Capitalism: Networking in the Global Market System, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schoettle, Enid C.B. and Grant, Kate (1998) Globalisation: A Discussion Paper, New York: The Rockefeller Foundation. Schofield Clark, Nancy (1998) “Dating on the net: teens and the rise of “pure relationships”, in Jones (1998): 159–83.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

At the same time, perhaps this genre of extrapolative futurism is just another way of saying that mathematics is universal and algorithmic technologies are medium independent, and so we need to employ them differently than we do now (which is true). Or, perhaps, is it but an elegant humming along with the most superficial and poorly theorized aspects of digital capitalism as it dissolves raw materials into interchangeable goods and services, and so the melody is rewarded for flattering the illusion that these linear speculations represent timeless principles? Industrial capitalism had social Darwinism, and today do we have instead a social Turingism: financialization as social metaphysics?