Platforms have distributed propaganda that cultivated bigotry, all the while being prone to security breaches. When coupled with the looting of economic sectors like journalism, plus the installation of mass surveillance infrastructure which collaborates with state and corporate entities, the emerging image is of firms whose routine operations are wholly adjacent to broad-based democratic imperatives. Moreover, the centrality of privately owned platforms to American culture is indicative of the extent to which capital has gained control of public discourse. This algorithmic public sphere presents a general impediment to democratization in the US and elsewhere. But this is only the departure point for an analysis of class rule and unfreedom in American life.
More broadly, conditions for capital accumulation have never been more favourable. But the efficiency of this social logic is necessarily bound together with the dramatic acceleration of global social inequality and thus the beginnings of revolutionary demands from the many who have been excluded and for whom it has come at their expense. One looping effect of this deprivation and the contradictions upon which it rests is that an organic crisis emerged in the US. One ‘fix’ to this crisis has been to embrace Caesarism, to redirect grievances and curtail some means of democratic redress. The political terrain is shifting so it would be foolish to offer declarative forecasts about these developments as there is much struggle ahead. But the ruling class has the advantage of incumbency. Presently they are using it to shore up their positions. For example, between the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act of 2020, the US has seen the largest upward transfer of wealth in the country’s history, with a projected tax revenue shortfall of $195 billion over ten years (Whitehouse and Doggett, 2020). All of this reveals the deep cruelty of the American ruling class. But it also generally vindicates American democratic socialists’ analysis of the structural
Still, due to the ruling class’s entrenchment, the socialist agenda will not be on the November 2020 ballot, an election presented as a selection between either democracy or authoritarianism. But while party platforms and politics are important, they are delimited by the interplay between pre-existing basic social forms. In their current practice, elections are but a means to exclude, co-opt or fragment a dissatisfied working class. Aside from the democratic socialists, there is little recognition of these material foundations of American life. Besides which, a society that has democratic equipment but cannot enact democratic change cannot rightly be described as a democracy. Democracy requires the constraint of rulers and a robust human rights culture. The US has neither. This is indicative of a society where freedoms are deemed important but subsidiary to the pursuit of wealth.
These concerns frame the broader themes that traverse this book. I have sought to understand how 21st-century American life has come to shape, and be shaped by, communication technology. Using materialist class analysis, this has been through examining the ramifications of ‘datafication’ on the social question. I have argued that ‘datafication’ is indicative of ‘the great simplification’ occurring in the US. By this I mean that social questions are repeatedly flattened into ostensibly depoliticized issues while concurrently reproducing the uneven social relations that underwrite the current moment of late capitalism. This unevenness can be found in the class and race relations that characterize American imperialism.
The first portion of the book examined the fatal abstractions of capitalist rule, that being how established social relations are reproduced by nominally ‘objective’ and ‘information-based’ digital tools. I sought to engage issues around ‘data politics’ while also challenging the conventional literature that dominates the current discussion of the political economy of algorithmic life. Here my central concern was how datafication promotes both invisible and opaque planned economies thereby foreclosing politics. Thereafter, I examined how the one-dimensionality of data makes the subjective objective. Through an examination of the various social properties of actors and the social forces engaged in the production, circulation and authorization of knowledge, I showed how compelled participation in a particular mode of evaluation produces a narrow criterion of economic inclusion. The result has been to transform complex and diverse social processes into homogenous, standardized objects ripe for technical manipulation suitable for AI computing for the efficient extraction of surplus value.
Moving on, I looked at how Silicon Valley’s shareholders control the inescapable foundation of the contemporary economy – cell phones, social networks, cloud-computing, retail, logistics and the like. Increasingly platforms provide the means and mechanisms by which all public affairs and private business is conducted. These control rights give shareholders the power to shape politics and public discourse; their wealth gives them clout few other people have. So part of plotting the possible trajectories of the political economy of this century requires understanding the nexus between ‘big finance’, ‘big tech’ and ‘big politics’. But there should be caution here. Critiques that centre on Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Washington can lose sight of the mode of production in which these entities reside and relate to one another. Altogether this means that capitalism does not require a class-conscious ruling class, rather that the structured (antagonistic) relations between capitalists, state managers and workers preserves the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Without dictates or strictures this explains the general maintenance of a system that has the most to do with oppression writ large. That said, due to the escalation and stakes of intra-elite competition, as well as the need to cooperate for a common defence against the many due to conditions of extreme social inequality, a ruling class consciousness has formed. This ruling class consciousness can be observed in aggressive class struggle ‘from above’.
Granted, the ruling class is not a monolithic entity. Different capitalists pursue different strategies, form different alliances and have different visions of capitalism, as in the proverbial ‘big finance’, ‘big tech’ and ‘big politics’. And so fraternal competition is to be expected as well as a degree of intra-class conflict. Still, because the stakes are so high, and because they are under organized siege, this ruling class consciousness is well aware of the consequences of losing control of the commanding heights of the political economy. To help preserve their rule, they use digital media companies to promote their agenda, use platforms to distribute their messages and enrol the American cultural superstructure to codify their rule. As such, the locus of politics is less about presenting appalling agendas and ‘expanding the basket of goods’, and more about regulating who can vote and the relative weight of those votes, all facilitated by a willing judiciary.
Mystification, rationalization, externalization
My argument is less about scaremongering over the oppressive capacities of new technological forms, but rather the attempt to identify how the social logics behind technology have become beholden to capital accumulation. This has been aided by a long decline in union membership and bargaining power, the retreat of basic labour standards and their enforcement, and a fiscal policy that prioritizes inflation targeting over employment. These lost protections also require that we discuss accumulated disadvantage as well as the institutional structures created to sustain its potency. As a result, the rich are much better positioned to direct the investments that shape the rollout of digital technologies in finance, insurance and real estate. The disproportionate clout of their ideas, class expectations and desires means that from the beginning, democratic life in digital societies is on the back foot. These issues are not just confined to the Global North. It also continues longstanding marginalization in the Global South from equitable participation in the design and implementation decisions about these technologies.
If the current path trajectory remains unaltered, soon all existing social relations may be encoded, meaning that social inequality will be programmed into the social infrastructure. Using Frank Pasquale’s (2015) turn of phrase, it will be as if we will come to live in a ‘black box society’, meaning that as persons become increasingly visible, the data infrastructure which organizes their lives becoming increasingly invisible, known only to insiders. And sometimes even the technologists are still unsure about AI’s reasoning. As states and corporations seek to use metrics to understand, predict and control the behaviour of
Computation alters the distribution and use of power in social settings, which in turn affects the distribution of resources in ways that can be uneven and often unfair. But it is also important to underscore that computation does not automatically make social life more uneven and more unfair. Rather, through altering or replacing the existing institutional frameworks, algorithmic life could foster broad-based human flourishing. There is no sociological law that stipulates that algorithmic life must be inherently discriminatory. We should not be indifferent or fatalistic to these upheavals. I think there is much heart to be taken from resurgent broad-based socialist politics in the US. When democratization does come, it will emerge from this venue.
Digital society requires significant restructuring if it is to facilitate greater democratization. But unless it is achieved via a path where workers’ democracy is entrenched, then whatever social provisions and degree of democracy happens to be attained through concessions, it will always be susceptible to erosion as capitalists reassert themselves at a later date. This is the lesson to take from the neoliberal revanche: that the very best of postwar social liberalism was not strong enough to protect people from this creeping threat. As such, an emancipatory political project must go beyond simply being satisfied with better wages or racial and gender diversity in the ruling class.
Granted, American imperialism is simultaneously formidable and violently vindictive, meaning that there are social costs to critique. This can partly explain why there is a tendency in digital scholarship to treat heterodox consumptive patterns and self-fashioning as politically subversive. These become the thin edge of possibility for something more. Yet it is precisely because of this vindictiveness that we must resist the tendency to take comfort in small acts. It is hardly an acceptable substitute for the mass participatory action required to keep politics as an open human activity. The uncompromising totality of radical critique is an essential organizing framework for the intellectual work required to support this project. Anything less makes it that much harder to build broad-based movements that can gain ground for a politics committed to greater democratization in all aspects of human life.
In many different registers, widespread digital communication is revolutionary. Within four decades the internet expanded from niche military, government and scientific institutions to being integral to all parts of social life. In providing access to many goods and facilitating the creation of others, it has become a public good in and of itself. This fact has often been construed as a key episode within a triumphant narrative found in the cheerleading technology press as well as large-circulation newspapers about the potency for greater communication to yield opportunities for commerce and emancipation. In one way or another, digital utopians have argued that the internet is, or can be, a great leveller. But the promise of egalitarian liberation is far from materializing. Instead, power has radically concentrated with the ruling class, those that own the means of production. This development should be foremost in any analysis of contemporary social life. Accordingly, the key question should be how does the development, acquisition and deployment of technology reshape the balance of power between governors and the governed. Put simply, what kind of society do we want?
