Media, Technology & Culture 10 (3rd Edition): Extractive Technologies

As we come to the end of this series, we seem to be circling around an important contemporary theme: the emergent scepticism about digital platforms. This scepticism is not only about the murky decision-making power of digital platforms’ technical systems, discussed in our last episode. It’s also that there is increasing awareness about their operation as private entities. Entities that do not exist for our own individual benefit. Entities which, even if they have some value as mediums of publicity, or have some public utility, are not publicly-owned. Put simply, whatever they say about their mission, digital services and platforms - ranging from Facebook to Google to Amazon to Airbnb to Uber to Open AI - are first and foremost about making money. Making money in a way that relies substantially on extracting data from and about us: what we do, when, where and how we do things, as well as our explicit signals about why. Often, this extraction also enables an approximation of who we might be. It is true that data mining can divulge intimate personal details about us. But what is principally happening in such processes is the construction of user models, a statistical profile which we match, often fairly precisely. A model of a situated user that can be targeted for advertising, or marketing, or triggered in various ways to remain faithful to the platform. And when users are faithful to these platforms, they generate yet more data for extraction. In this episode, we consider how these insights have inspired a revival of sorts amongst political economy and Marxist approaches to media, towards a new critique of digital or platform capitalism. But is this capitalism? Or is it, as suggested speculatively in a number of critical perspectives, something worse.

Thinkers Discussed: Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power); Anne Helmond (The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready); Tarleton Gillespie (The Politics of Platforms); Jose van Dijck (The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media); Fernando van der Vlist, Anne Helmond and Fabian Ferrari (Big AI: Cloud infrastructure Dependence and the Industrialisation of Artificial Intelligence); Jose van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Wall (The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World); Nick Srnicek (Platform Capitalism); McKenzie Wark (Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?); Jodi Dean (Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Forclosure of Politics / The Neofeudalising Tendency of Communicative Capitalism); Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism); Joel Kotkin (The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class); Evgeny Morozov (Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason); Maïa Pal and Neal Harris (Capital is Dead. Long Live Capital! A Political Marxist Analysis of Digital Capitalism and Infrastructure); Clive Barnett (The Consolations of ‘Neoliberalism’).