Platform Socialism , livre ebook

Pluto Press - James Muldoon

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126 pages

English

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'Ground-breaking and ambitious' - Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism

Whoever controls the platforms, controls the future. Platform Socialism sets out an alternative vision and concrete proposals for a digital economy that expands our freedom.

Powerful tech companies now own the digital infrastructure of twenty-first century social life. Masquerading as global community builders, these companies have developed sophisticated new techniques for extracting wealth from their users.

James Muldoon shows how grassroots communities and transnational social movements can take back control from Big Tech. He reframes the technology debate and proposes a host of new ideas, from the local to the international, for how we can reclaim the emancipatory possibilities of digital platforms. Drawing on sources from forgotten histories to contemporary prototypes, he proposes an alternative system and charts a roadmap for how we can get there.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. All the World’s a Platform

2. Monetising Community

3. Community-Washing Big Tech

4. Private Power and Public Infrastructure

5. Guild Socialism for the Digital Economy

6. Building Civic Platforms

7. Global Digital Services

8. Recoding Our Digital Future

9. Postscript: 2042

Notes

Index

Sujets

Political Advocacy

Political Process

Social Aspects

Media Studies

Social Science

COMPUTERS

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Sociologie, société et politique

E-Commerce

General officer

Political economy

Electronic commerce

Economics

Activism

General

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 janvier 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780745346977
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0748€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Platform Socialism
A ground-breaking, ambitious and rigorous account of how and why we must take control over contemporary digital technologies.
-Nick Srnicek, Lecturer in Digital Economy, King s College London and author of Platform Capitalism
A clarion call for hope amid twenty-first-century doom. With analytical flair, he shows that platforms are not invincible and that their infrastructure may be the key to a better world.
-Phil Jones, author of Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism
A compelling account of the political struggles that will be needed to challenge capital s control over digital platforms, and an essential read for anyone who believes in technology s emancipatory potential.
-Wendy Liu, author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism
A punchy analysis of the platform economy that offers more than a critique of big tech s vision of our collective future. Muldoon sketches the contours of a democratic socialist alternative.
-Aaron Benanav, Researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin and author of Automation and the Future of Work
Encourages us to open our minds fully to the possibility of an alternative future, in which technology is put to work for the many, not the few.
-Lizzie O Shea, lawyer and author of Future Histories

First published 2022 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright James Muldoon 2022
Material has been reprinted from the following articles and reproduced by kind permission of the publishers: Airbnb Has Been Rocked by COVID-19: Do We Really Want to See It Recover? , openDemocracy, 4 April 2020; Why We Need Cooperatives for the Digital Economy , Jacobin, 7 May 2020; Don t Break Up Facebook - Make It a Public Utility , Jacobin, 16 December 2020.
The right of James Muldoon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4695 3 Paperback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4696 0 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4697 7 EPUB
ISBN 978 0 7453 4698 4 PDF

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 All the World s a Platform
2 Monetising Community
3 Community-Washing Big Tech
4 Private Power and Public Infrastructure
5 Guild Socialism for the Digital Economy
6 Building Civic Platforms
7 Global Digital Services
8 Recoding Our Digital Future
9 Postscript: 2042
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
This book was written during the first lockdown and substantially revised during the second. It benefited from the feedback of three anonymous reviewers from Pluto Press who helped me reshape the central arguments and cut extraneous material. The team at Pluto have been amazingly supportive in seeing the book through the production process.
The argument builds on a line of thought I have been pursuing since 2019 about alternatives to the current organisation of digital platforms. It builds on a theoretical framework I developed in Building Power to Change the World and Council Democracy . It also draws on commentary I have written for Open Democracy and Jacobin . Material has been reprinted from the following articles: Airbnb Has Been Rocked by COVID-19: Do We Really Want to See It Recover? , openDemocracy , 4 April 2020; Why We Need Cooperatives for the Digital Economy , Jacobin , 7 May 2020; Don t Break Up Facebook - Make It a Public Utility , Jacobin , 16 December 2020.
The book owes much to the thriving intellectual community at the think tank Autonomy. I am appreciative of those who offered their generous feedback on an early draft of two chapters. Thank you to Will Stronge, Julian Siravo, Stephanie Sherman, Phil Jones, Jack Kellam, Kam Sandhu, Kyle Lewis, Joe Ryle, Lukas Kikuchi, Cosimo Campani, Luiz Garcia, Sonia Balagopalan, Ishan Khurana and all the collaborators and affiliates who have contributed to Autonomy s work over the years.
Phil Jones read and commented on a full draft and made insightful comments that greatly improved the book. Mirjam M ller, Bruno Leipold, Rahel S ss, Roberta Fischli and Steven Klein helped me think through different sections of the book and provided invaluable feedback.
Thank you also to participants in our socialist calculation debate reading group, including Lillian Cicerchia, Tully Rector, Aaron Benanav, Jack Kellam, Natasha Piano, Mirjam and Steven. I have learned a lot from all of your insightful analyses and from reading your work.
I couldn t have asked for a more supportive environment for my teaching and research than with my colleagues at the University of Exeter, Penryn. In particular, Andy Schaap, Clare Saunders and Karen Scott have offered much advice and support during my first years at the university.
I owe a debt of gratitude to my friends and family for their ongoing support, in particular to my family in Australia who I have not seen since lockdown and miss immensely. To Sarah, Beth, Michael, Stacey, Noah, Catriona and Pete, I promise to give you real birthday presents when I see you and not give you a copy of this book. In London, I have spent much time during lockdown with Lele, Johannes, Marion, Paul, Jeanne, Tom and Nick whose support, kindness and stimulating conversations were a source of inspiration throughout the process.
I also need to acknowledge the important contributions of my two miniature dachshunds, Barcus Aurelius and Karl Barx for their many cuddles and amusing antics. You get away with too much, but you are so damn cute. I take consolation in the fact that I know you didn t choose the naughty boy life, it chose you.
The most important person throughout has been my inspirational wife, Yasamin. Thank you for everything - for all your support, conversations and adventures together. I owe you so much and am so grateful to share my life with you.
Introduction
The most tragic form of loss isn t the loss of security; it s the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
A deep sense of technological determinism pervades our present era. Tech entrepreneurs predict how technology will transform our world for years to come. These silicon prophets concoct grand visions of our automated and bioengineered future with glittery images of luxury and convenience. Technology is habitually cast as an external force developing on its own accord and dragging us along with it. Too often, calls for digital transformation involve us adapting to the demands of new technology rather than us consciously shaping it. In the absence of any bold ideas from politicians, the tech world has claimed ownership over the future tense.
We have come to see it as normal to give up control over our data and allow platform companies to profit from our activity. The exchange appears to be innocent and even beneficial to us - we use a free service and in exchange companies can use information gathered from the platform to sell targeted advertising. We take it for granted that digital platforms should be privately owned fiefdoms ruled by a tech despot, with billions in profits distributed to a few wealthy shareholders. We accept this situation because this is how the technology has always been presented to us. Platform companies established set patterns for how these products would operate at a time when it was still unclear how fundamentally they would transform our lives. As new markets opened up, a generation of entrepreneurs and gurus took advantage of the public s relative ignorance to claim dominance over this new arena of social life.
But we need to confront the threat Big Tech currently poses to our freedom and democracy. While some of the methods are new, we shouldn t allow the technology to obscure the fact that the basic structure is all too familiar. Platform companies set the rules of the game and benefit from the wealth we create. As individual users of the platform we have little power to affect how it is organised. Now we face a dilemma. We have more tools at our disposal but less control over how they are designed. We can communicate with nearly anyone across the globe but can t determine the conditions in which we connect. We use services for free but see little of the value extracted from our digital lives. It has become easier for us to imagine humans living forever in colonies on Mars than exercising meaningful democratic control over digital platforms.
Big Tech promotes ideas of global community and puts forward wholesome images of their companies helping others connect and find belonging in an alienated and globalised world. Despite their litigious campaigns to undermine local governments and evade regulations, tech companies paint themselves as benevolent partners of local communities and facilitators of new forms of tech-enabled social life. By creating the digital infrastructure that facilitates online communities, platform companies have inserted value capture mechanisms between people seeking to interact and exchange online. Digital platforms are tools that enable a more sophisticated business model for exploiting our social interactions and connections with others. Rather than view this as an aberrant form of surveillance capitalism - driven by an alternative logic and responding to fundamentally different imperatives than capitalism itself - it is more accurate to understand this as an extension and intensification of capitalism s central drive of appropriating human life for