Academic literature on the topic 'Digital monopoly capitalism'

Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy (New York: New Press, 2013), 299 pages, $27.95, hardcover.Without question, the Internet has had a profound influence on the world. As with most technologies, debates rage over whether this development has been positive or negative. Celebrants proclaim with utopian fervor that a new age of democracy has arrived, allowing for decentralized communication, challenges to corporate control, and mass public participation in the most important decisions confronting humanity. Skeptics point to the ways the Internet has spread ignorance and misinformation instead of knowledge, undermined the ability of artists to earn a living, and exacerbated isolation, unhappiness, and alienation. While these arguments illuminate the potential benefits and drawbacks of the Internet, they tend to ignore or disregard the larger political economy within which the Internet exists. In Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy, Robert W. McChesney transcends these one-sided engagements, offering a nuanced analysis of the development of the Internet within the context of monopoly capitalism, revealing both the limitations of this technology in its current state and its massive potential.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

buy this issueA little less than two years ago, in July-August 2014, Monthly Review published a special summer issue under the title Surveillance Capitalism, edited by John Mage.… The lead article by Foster and McChesney was itself entitled "Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age." In Foster and McChesney's analysis, the problem of surplus absorption under monopoly capital was seen as having led to the development over the last seven decades of a massive surveillance network, extending across the sales effort, finance, and the military, and integral to the entire information economy.… We were therefore pleased to discover that the concept of "surveillance capitalism" has now entered the mainstream and is drawing considerable attention, through the work of Shoshana Zuboff, emeritus professor at the Harvard Business School.… " She failed, however, to mention the prior treatment of "surveillance capitalism" in Monthly Review, despite the fact that her analysis was written in November 2014—judging by her accessing of numerous articles on the Internet on that date—four months after the MR issue was published and posted online.…Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

How does the platform digital economy, which has emerged as a new business model, appear in terms of the long history of capitalism? The irony is that there is a tendency to monopolize the DNA of the platform industry based on value-based “network effects”. As long as these companies are born and grown in a capitalist environment, they cannot escape the laws of capitalist competition. “More users → more interactions → more data → more value”. Given that the initial dominance tends to solidify into a permanent position leading the industry, it is inevitably a foregone conclusion that these platform capital will turn into a monopoly. So if the state owns it, it will be like China. Nick Surnick's answer to this is a “public platform” or “decapitalist platform”. State regulations that we can easily think of - such as prohibiting monopolies, blocking exploitative lean platforms, protecting privacy and avoiding tax evasion - are urgently needed, but this is a minimal step and cannot address the structural conditions that have brought these companies to life. And with a cooperative platform, it is not powerful to confront strong platform monopolies. As Nick Sernick argues in platform capitalism, capitalist contradictions occur and the big flow and direction of resolving them should not be forgotten. A way to promote technology with everyone's ownership, control and democratic participation and distribution as a “public platform” or “decapitalist platform”. It's not new, but it's not like I've ever been, but the path of widowhood still lies ahead of us. It will be necessary for the state to exercise the necessary regulatory power and invest in the development of public platform technology, making it a de-capitalist platform.

A new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratising qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ – understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalisation – at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilise code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritising rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalises on the potential of platforms to realise monopoly rents.

This article proposes a conceptual framework of how the United States is reinventing colonialism in the Global South through the domination of digital technology. Using South Africa as a case study, it argues that US multinationals exercise imperial control at the architecture level of the digital ecosystem: software, hardware and network connectivity, which then gives rise to related forms of domination. The monopoly power of multinational corporations is used for resource extraction through rent and surveillance – economic domination. By controlling the digital ecosystem, Big Tech corporations control computer-mediated experiences, giving them direct power over political, economic and cultural domains of life – imperial control. The centrepiece of surveillance capitalism, Big Data, violates the sanctity of privacy and concentrates economic power in the hands of US corporations – a system of global surveillance capitalism. As a feature of surveillance capitalism, Global North intelligence agencies partner with their own corporations to conduct mass and targeted surveillance in the Global South – which intensifies imperial state surveillance. US elites have persuaded people that society must proceed according to its ruling class conceptions of the digital world, setting the foundation for tech hegemony. The author argues for a different ecosystem that decentralises technology by placing control directly into the hands of the people to counter the rapidly advancing frontier of digital empire.

2021 has been called the first year of the metaverse, which is an independent virtual digital world that is both imitative and transcendent to the real physical world. Many tech giants claim that this technological innovation will bring huge opportunities and dividends to society, but some critics believe that it will also pose challenges to the current social ethics. The important moral challenges may stem from the data issue posed by the metaverse, which is believed to build an unequal relationship between users and service providers due to data-intensive technologies such as VR. This paper argues that the unequal relationships in data have caused the typical consequences of what Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism and posed three major moral challenges to our society, including alienation, exploitation, and domination. According to the Marxist account, alienation and exploitation arise from the existence of digital labor and the monopoly of means of production in the metaverse, while by referring to the Republican account of liberty, the emergence of domination can be attributed to the inequality of data possession.

This article investigates the impact of what we label “digital capitalism” on the structure and organization of the legal profession. We explore whether the rise of digital capitalism is transforming the dynamics of the legal field by the introduction of new actors and ways of practicing law, which might challenge the traditional control (and monopoly) of jurists on the production of law. We find that not only have new service providers already entered the legal market, but also new on-line tools for solving legal disputes or producing legal documents are gaining a foothold. Similarly, we also find that new intelligent search systems are challenging the role of junior lawyers and paralegals with regard to reviewing large sets of documents. However, big data techniques deployed to predict future courts’ decisions are not yet advanced enough to pose a challenge. Overall, we argue that these developments will not only change legal practices, but are also likely to influence the internal structure and organization of the legal field. In particular, we argue that the processes of change associated with digitalization is further accelerating the economization and commodification of the practice of law, whereby lawyers are decreasingly disinterested brokers in society and defenders of the public good, and increasingly service firms at the cutting edge of the capitalist economy. These developments are also triggering new forms of stratification of the legal field. While some legal actors will likely benefit from digitalization and expand their business, either by integrating new technologies to reach more clients or by developing new niche areas of practices, the more routinized forms of legal practice are facing serious challenges and will most likely be replaced by technology and associated service firms.

Abstract This article anticipates a political project that underlines China's infrastructural capitalism and the infrastructural power of labor in the making of the Chinese working class. This project embarks a re-departure of the left movement after the Jasic struggle, which inspired a rebirth of global Marxism and Maoism that attempts to confront the failure of the first wave of socialist movements and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism. Meeting this historical conjuncture, this project is situated in the legacy of the Chinese Revolution and its firmly held belief in the class struggles of the working masses who fought for a vision of communism since the early 1920s. As part of a global project in preparation for the new wave of emancipatory movements, this project is also located in a global anti-capitalism movement and attempts to overcome the parochial and nationalistic approach of existing Chinese Marxism. Specifically, the author conceives that Chinese capitalism has entered a new age of monopoly supported not only by new phases of high technology but also, more importantly, by state power in constructing infrastructural bases such as building projects, new economic zones, highways and high-speed railways, digital platforms, and logistics, both internally and externally, to reproduce expanded capitalism, resulting in fierce imperial battles among global powers. The article conceptualizes this historical process not only as “infrastructural capitalism,” a term that vividly embodies the materiality of expanded capitalism, but also the infrastructural power of labor to take root.

Cette thèse contribue à l’étude d’une des plus grandes entreprises contemporaines et peut-être la plus représentative du capitalisme contemporain : Amazon. L’objectif général de cette thèse est de placer le travail au cœur de l’analyse, en montrant sa centralité dans la production de la valeur, même dans ces corporations géantes que sont les « monopoles digitaux ». Avec son vaste réseau logistique et ses millions de salariés, Amazon est un cas d’étude privilégié pour comprendre (1) pourquoi ces monopoles, malgré leur caractère « digital », reposent sur des infrastructures physiques massives et comment ces infrastructures dépendent du travail, dans le cas d’Amazon du travail salarié, de millions de travailleuses et travailleurs, notamment dans les entrepôts logistiques ; (2) comment Amazon gère cette main d’œuvre pour faire en sort de mobiliser l’effort de ses salariés et en même temps de démobiliser leurs résistances, mais surtout comment ces stratégies changent en parallèle avec l’évolution de sa stratégie de profit (3) comment le caractère « disruptif » des monopoles digitaux se déploie dans des contextes historiques et institutionnels différents des États-Unis, notamment pour ce qui concerne les modes de régulations du travail et leur impact sur les conditions de travail chez Amazon. Pour répondre à ces trois question la thèse mobilise les résultats d’une enquête à plusieurs niveaux : le niveau procès de travail, étudié à travers l’observation participante, interviews avec les salariés et sources écrites ; le niveau de la stratégie de profit d’Amazon, examinée à partir de l’analyse des bilans d’entreprise, interviews avec le management ; le niveau des relations professionnelles locales et transnationales, analysées à travers l’observation directe des activités syndicales, interviews et l’exploitation de sources secondaires
This thesis contributes to the study of one of the largest contemporary companies and perhaps the most representative of contemporary capitalism: Amazon. The main goal of this thesis is to bring labour back at the core of the analysis, showing its centrality in the production of value, even in those giant corporations called “digital monopolies”.With its vast logistics network and millions of employees scattered across dozens of countries, Amazon is an ideal case study for understanding (1) why these monopolies, despite their “digital” nature, rely on massive physical infrastructures and how these infrastructures depends on the activity of millions of workers – in the case of Amazon, wage-workers, particularly in logistics warehouses; (2) how Amazon manages this workforce in order to mobilise the effort of employees while simultaneously demobilising their resistance, but above all how these strategies change at the same time as the evolution of Amazon’s profit strategy (3) how the “disruptive” power of digital monopolies unfolds in historical and institutional contexts other than those of the United States, particularly in terms of labour regulations and its impact on working conditions in Amazon’s workplace. To answer these three questions, the thesis mobilises the results of a multi-level investigation: the level of the labour process, studied through participant observation, interviews with employees and written sources; the level of Amazon’s profit strategy, examining the company’s balance sheets, interviewing management, and analysing vast secondary sources; the level of industrial relations, local and transnational, analysed through the direct observation of trade union activities, interviews and secondary sources

Digital platforms have come under intense scrutiny from scholars, policy makers, regulators, and the general public for their immense and yet largely opaque influence on the social and economic sphere. This book advances value-form and social-form directions in Marxian theory, moving beyond mainstream economic reasoning that informs much of the debate. Digital monopoly platforms such as Google and Facebook are analysed in light of their profit seeking behaviour and monetary flows generated primarily through advertising and data commodification. Considering the unity of production and circulation the book argues that outputs are better understood as a collection of different types of social forms shaped by capital (pre, intermediate and final commodities) and as forms of public wealth (Copyleft Free Software, publicly financed science and research). The authors critically engage with Marxian theories that conceptualise user activities as forms of digital labour, with zero-price markets and critical legal theories, as well as with ‘internet exceptionalism’ in various forms. The role of regulation of production, especially of financial markets and monopolies is critically discussed with an empirical analysis of the development of GAFAM companies, Google’s mandatory reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission, and of digital advertising of Google and Facebook. The book discusses contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, limits of ongoing reform initiatives, and alternatives to the logic of capital and commodity production on digital platforms.

In Chapter 3 the authors critically discuss how monopoly is conceptualised as aberration from perfect competition in mainstream economics, or as a stage in the development of capitalism that leads to the dominance of the giant trans-national corporation from some Marxian perspectives. Monopoly is already present at the start of the capitalist process as monopoly over the means of production. Furthermore, there is an inherent tendency toward monopoly coming out of the core of competitive mechanism. Thus, competition and monopoly do not serve as exclusive points or stages, but as processes within a continuum of accumulation and expansion of capital. The limits and boundaries that shape competition, monopoly and accumulation are framed by technological, institutional, and political factors. Legal form and legal practices have the capacity to constitute abstract produced objects as commodities, which in specific conditions enter the circuit of capital and augment capital accumulation. That is, in fact, generalized across different historical varieties of capitalism and it is essential for the accumulation based on intangible assets.

The chapter is a concise creative essay by one of the protagonists of Cuban alternative blogging movement and emerging civil society. Younger generations in Cuba want to have their voices heard worldwide, despite the official censorship of the Castro government and the repression of the State Security. Freedom of expression as well as fundamental freedoms are still under attack in Cuba today, the once-called Island of Utopia by many international intellectuals, academics, and all sorts of political pilgrims mainly from the Left. Therefore, it is very important to know the insights of this peaceful struggle of the Cuban people for a more inclusive and democratic country, beyond the historic monopoly of the Communist Party. It is also important to understand why solidarity from abroad is necessary for these 21st-century freedom fighters not to succumb in isolation under the physical oppression but also under the misleading narrative of the Cuban Revolution seen as resistance to U.S. Imperialism and global capitalism. This creative essay playfully displays an initial map useful both for Cuban studies experts as well as for the common tourist.

How individuals connect to others, buy wanted products, and work to achieve shared goals determine their opportunities for health and life success. In this century, companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft now decide how people can connect with others. By collecting data on purchases, behavior, and beliefs from their customers’ hardware, digital and cellphone use, Big Tech companies have created surveillance capitalism where personal data is a commodity to buy and sell. By targeting users for digital ads for unhealthy products; giving bullies access to a global audience; using likes and dislike to polarize people into opposing factions; or selling personal information to advertisers and special interests, these companies have compromised health, democracy, and privacy. In response, tech workers, social media users, privacy groups, and anti-monopoly reformers have challenged the domination of Big Tech companies and forged ways to use technology for human well-being instead of corporate profit.

This study explores the direct impacts of the current Covid-19 pandemic-induced online learning and teaching at the higher education level. It indicates that its future physical campus would be a hybrid or blended instruction setting when Covid-19 is over. Due to Covid-19 lockdown and social distance regulations, face-to-face classroom instruction was deemed unsafe for the academic community. Hence, online education became the cornerstone of academia’s ability to deliver its services to the students. Indirectly, Covid-19 forced academia to adopt online learning and teaching platforms to deliver and meet the students’ instructional needs. Developing more efficient online learning and teaching software and devices helped enhance and improve student learning outcomes during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Thus, academia needs to capitalize on these achievements. However, this development would challenge the monopoly powers of the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom setting. This study examines the evidence of the effectiveness and shortcomings of online learning and teaching. It further examines and provides strategies to resolve the digital learning and teaching challenges. This eradication would make the hybrid or blended learning and teaching setting effectively compete with the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom setting in the future physical campus of higher education. This study’s research questions are. What lessons have we learned from the current online education and learning model? Is the higher education level thinking and ready to adopt a new classroom setting? Would the hybrid or blended instruction promote better students learning outcomes and maximize their learning? Would the new learning mode promote better internationalization standards for higher education? Would the new learning mode be cost-efficient? The study’s findings on the above research questions demonstrate the importance, threats, and indirect effects of hybrid or blended learning instruction. The indirect effects are complementary to the future physical campus. The study will contribute to the literature on the next stage of learning and teaching in academia. The study would quicken the higher education institutions' planning and adaptation to a new learning instruction setting. The developers of complementary software and technology devices could start planning how they would create new pedagogical tools and benefit from the future campus. The study will reinforce the view that online learning and teaching instruction has come to stay with academia. The study shows how hybrid or blended learning instruction will help academia overcome some of the shortcomings of online learning and teaching education. The study will harmonize with previous studies by proving that hybrid or blended learning instruction is the next frontier of the students' learning instruction. The study could strengthen the growing awareness among faculty, scholars, researchers, and formal academic institutions on the subject matter.