Re: <nettime> Critical literature on big tech corps?

El nov 27, 2017 5:10 AM, "Kasper Skov" <kasper.skov@gmail.com> escribió:

Wow, so many (lengthy) replies. Did not expects this amount of references. Will get the books, read and hopefully gain some new knowledge on the way.

Thanks everyone!

Med venlig hilsen/Kind regards
Kasper Skov Christensen
Phone: 42 41 93 98
Ph.d. Student #digitaldesign @ Aarhus University Denmark
Design and Tech Consultant, Techno DJ and producer, Hacker

On 26 Nov 2017, at 19:22, t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com> wrote:

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
<...>

# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: