Cédric Durand analyzes the consequences for economic structures of the rise of the digital economy, in terms both of competitive dynamics and social relations – and sees in them a new form of feudalism.
The digital world is the result of the accumulation of centuries of scientific and organizational progress. Virtuality is further enabled by the materiality of computers, objects that are themselves the product of economic exchanges and labor.
Five leading scholars of Big Tech studies share their views on the hopes and dangers of the on-going Digital Revolution. Their answers reveal the pressing need for more political, social and economic theorizing of these dynamics.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection focuses on digital tools, their relationship to political power and capitalism.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection focuses on China today, its uses of digital technologies to govern, and the political theories developed by its intellectuals.
Chinese society has been thoroughly transformed by digital tools, which private companies have developed for people to shop, chat, entertain themselves. The central and local governments have tried to keep up to date. Jesper Schlæger explains the intricacies of Chinese eGovernment.
The study of Asian practices can teach us a lot on media and their role in the global decline of democracy. Indonesia and the Philippines show that digitalisation has not only failed to fight against the capture of mainstream media by oligarchs but also to boost the fourth estate.
Nationalist discourses take the lion share of politics-related discussions on the Chinese Internet. In the context of intense struggles over the interpretation of the Hong Kong protests, this interview with Florian Schneider sheds light on the complexity of online political and identity expression in China and elsewhere.
Daniel Cohen addresses the changes in our globalised world with an anxiety rarely seen among economists. The rise of homo digitalis, social networks and the robotisation of our economies call for us to seek ways to take collective control of the upheavals currently underway.
Has the digital economy definitively made the main tools of Marxist analysis obsolete? This is Mariano Zukerfeld’s argument, in a lively essay that suggests rethinking the critique of capitalism around the question of knowledge rather than labour. However, his demonstration lacks a convincing theory of value.
Looking at the mutations of photography since its origins, one realizes that contrary to what is often believed, it exalts artificiality, fiction and imagination and relies on an anti-naturalistic aesthetic. Could the 19th century be the matrix of our artistic modernity?
