All these suggestions so far seem good, but they mainly focus on 'tech'
corporations, as if to suggest that some diffuse idea of technology is
categorically different from everything else that corporations have been
doing for centuries. One big problem with this is the relationship
between these corporations and technology — say, whether it's a
product or service, an instrument, or a mechanism for some sort of
arbitrage. If we lump all those things together under a category like
'tech,' it's no wonder that the result seems mysterious. So it's also
worth thinking of 'technology' as yet another potent widget. There have
been and are other potent widgets: uppers (sugar, caffeine, tobacco,
coca) and downers (alcohol), opiates, weapons, ~crops (cotton, indigo),
and fuels (fossil fuels and even wood), 'media' (film, journalism), and
of course human beings (slavery and other forms of peonage). Obviously,
there are brilliant histories of how these other ~widgets have served,
if you like, as arbitrary platforms or media or whatever for exploiting
and distorting societies at every level. Thinking about technology in
this light is helpful for developing a more articulate, less mystified
model of what 'tech' corporations are, how they work, and their changing
place in wider human ecologies. One benefit of this is that it helps us
to recognize the corporation *as such* as a technology, which opens up
another kind of critical literature — about their history and
evolution. I only have a passing knowledge of that field, but I think
the 1970s and early 1980s were a good time for work was both critical
and accessible, like Richard Barnet and Ronald Müller's _Global Reach:
The Power of Multinational Corporations_. If we want to understand
current tech corporations, it's helpful to understand how their
expertise in manipulating jurisdictional and regional disparities
regarding data is rooted in older techniques — for example, technology
transfer arrangements in which a multinational would sell its
manufacturing assets to its foreign subsidiaries in order to exploit
multiple national tax regimes — by writing off the initial capital
investment, depreciating it, 'selling' it at a notional loss, writing it
off as a capital investment, ad nauseam — and profiting every step of
the way. In that sense, as they used to say, data really is the new oil
— not as the supposed 'smart' fuel or engine of 'new economies,' but
as yet another arbitrary dumb commodity that can be used to exploit
relational differences. That's borne out by, for example, the high-level
chicanery of techniques like the 'double Irish' exemption, in which a
few pages of legal documents translate into billions of profit by
companies like Google. This approach to thinking about corporations is
also validated by a few crucial current developments, mainly the rising
power of 'offshore' jurisdictions and multilateral trade treaties. These
two phenomena aren't at all concerned with the visible specific concerns
of particular corporations — for example, whether they're 'tech.'
Instead, these developments are concerned with corporations as such —
their supposed rights, powers, and obligations relative to states and
societies. Regulating data *on the basis of its specificity* is
important, as Wolfie Christl and Sarah Spiekermann argue, but we
shouldn't confuse it with regulating corporations as such. The wild
claim that 'technology' has changed everything so we need radically
totalizing new laissez-faire regional and global regimes, masks how
little has changed; and it distracts us from the need to revitalize
global regulatory regimes focused on the mundane procedures and
structures that, ultimately, define what corporations are are do,
whatever their business happens to be.
To be clear, I'm not saying technology is the 'same' as tobacco or
whatever — it isn't. But a good rule is to assume that everything is
always different and, on that basis, to try to understand the effects of
those differences in various contexts. Which is why it's important to
demystify 'tech,' rather than treating it as a diffuse power that
enshrouds a handful of corporations.
Cheers,
Ted
On 25 Nov 2017, at 15:04, Vesna Manojlovic wrote:
Hi Kasper,
0. "I Hate the Internet" = a novel by Jarett Kobe
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