Technology after Capitalism

Let us be clear, though: this is not the end of ownership, but rather the concentration of ownership.

Set in context, the lean platform economy ultimately appears as an outlet for surplus capital in an era of ultra-low interest rates and dire investment opportunities rather than the vanguard destined to revive capitalism.

Even the Economist is forced to admit that, since 2008, ‘if the share of domestic gross earnings paid in wages were to rise back to the average level of the 1990s, the profits of American firms would drop by a fifth’.

Apple, for instance, directly employs less than 10 per cent of the workers who contribute to the production of its products.

Marx wrote that the ‘piece-wage is the form of wages most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production’.

Lean platforms operate through a hyper-outsourced model, whereby workers are outsourced, fixed capital is outsourced, maintenance costs are outsourced, and training is outsourced. All that remains is a bare extractive minimum – control over the platform that enables a monopoly rent to be gained.

Just like oil, data are a material to be extracted, refined, and used in a variety of ways.

One of the earliest stabs at an on-demand economy centred on manufactured goods, particularly durable goods. The most influential of these efforts was the transformation of the jet engine business from one that sold engines into one that rented thrust.

GE’s liquid natural gas business alone is already collecting as many data as Facebook and requires a series of specialised tools to manage the influx of data.

More broadly, if our online interactions are free labour, then these companies must be a significant boon to capitalism overall – a whole new landscape of exploited labour has been opened up. On the other hand, if this is not free labour, then these firms are parasitical on other valueproducing industries and global capitalism is in a more dire state. A quick glance at the stagnating global economy suggests that the latter is more likely.