Digital capitalism and ideologies

Since its birth, Internet has been bearing the expectation of a new social and political progress (Benkler, 2006 ; Cardon, 2010). It has also become one of the centers of worldwide economy, concentrating stakes such as capturing value, inequalities, and regulation. Its main actors are installed in many technological hubs in the world and seen as the promoters of a new form of capitalism (Zukerfeld, 2017), not to say a threat to democracy (Morozov, 2011 & 2013). Their hegemony, equated with the rise of Silicon Valley (Lecuyer, 2006), calls for a renewal of classical tools and modes of analysis.

The scheme of “informational society” coming along with the rise of post-industrial economy (Bell, 1973) has long been subjected to a large set of analyses and critics. They addressed the shift of value creation towards the tertiary industry as well as the issue of the transformations of the production system and the new forms of capital circulation in the context of information networks (Castells, 2001; Schiller, 1999), or even the transformations of discourses and practices typical for this “new spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski et Chiapello, 1999).

The most recent works dedicated to the critic of digital capitalism have tried among other things to revive the links between work, exploitation and alienation by theorizing about cognitive capitalis (Moulier-Boutang, 2008), surveilliance (Zuboff, 2019), or else microwork (Casilli, 2019). This attempt of a new founding are indirectly asking the question of the blurring of traditional frontiers between work and value that usually make up the core of classical and neoclassical economical thought.

Indeed, wrongfooting its previous form, digital capitalism shows several abnormalities in this matter. First, because it is not based on a systematic commodification process (culture of costlessness, economy of sharing). The exclusive position of big companies is very relative (cf. “the ecosystem of start-ups”). The hegemony of managers and CEOS is often challenged by the explorations of developers and the own initiatives of entrepreneurs. Private property is not taken for granted anymore as the story of free software shows (Broca, 2013), while exploitation takes on more ambiguous forms as a result of work (labor?) autonomy, gamification and free contracting. Last, the growth of organization mainly rests on an investment economy characterized by the leading role of venture capitalists (Ferrari, Granovetter, 2009). While capital plays a central role in it, it is mostly under recomposed shapes and by circulating through differed, decentralized and expandable value chains based on intertwined relations and acquaintance networks.

The structure of this productive system therefore relies on financialization of innovation cycles, entanglement of new and former economy, management techniques, development of contracting and free work, which all make the future of welfare particulary unsure (Colin, 2018). In this regard, several stakes can be made clearer:

• the negociation of weak legal and financial constraints by big digital companies (fiscality, labour law, litigation, etc.),
• new forms of work organization overlapping with “platform capitalism” and combining extreme wages and job destruction and casualization,
• possible hindrances to the emergence of alternative models of property, exchange, cooperation, makers, cryptocurrencies, etc.) or their reintegration in the overall operation of digital capitalism,
• the overthrow of the privacy norm, seen through the lens of the problem of data collection and information treatment.

Second, we will pay particular attention to the homogeneity of narrative systems (“startup nation”, disruption theory, etc.). Indeed, a series of discourses are produced in order to accompany, justify, or motivate technological transformations – without the political nature of the latter always being fully recognized. Operated by a small number of actors, this ideological work aims to legitimize a “digital revolution” through the production of scenarios and narrative framings. It has thus become customary to associate the rise of the Internet with a form of “Californian ideology”, confusingly covering libertarianism, technological determinism, transhumanism, etc. (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996; Turner 2006).

More generally, as these new forms of capitalism have developed, liberalism has been profoundly transformed and renewed and now constitutes, in various declensions, a preponderant framework of thought (Loveluck, 2015).

Paradoxically, these discourses tend to hide their common denominator, that of a philosophical anthropology backed by microeconomics, cognitive sciences and forms of deterministic psychology. In doing so, they naturalize salient points about how subjectivity is integrated into the productive system, much like the quantified self movement.