<nettime> Big tech, the return of capital to its C18 supremacy, and the decline of American democracy

[Rana Dasgupta <rana@ranadasgupta.com>]

Dear Nettimers

Here's a recent essay which owes much to my contemplation of the various 
conversations on this list.  I apologies: I'm not spontaneous enough to 
participate in those conversations: I discover only much later what I 
think, and through writing pieces like this.

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/the-silenced-majority/

The assault on American democracy, I say here, is not a matter of 
personalities or political parties, but a deep-structural concomitant of 
the return of capital.  In order to understand the forces at work, we 
would do better ignoring the more obvious, but analytically 
inappropriate, parallels of Hitler, fascism, etc, and focussing instead 
on Britain in the eighteenth century.

In this light, today's Silicon Valley giants appear as a significant 
historical force of both technology and capital.  Both as technological 
platforms and as new formations of finance and (non-) labour, they are 
well-adapted to the task of expelling the Western masses from the centre 
of the world economy, and relegating them to the periphery - where they 
had been until the C19 or even C20.  Democracy, inevitably, then becomes 
the big problem - even in the wary, discriminatory form it has assumed 
in America.

Very best to all

R

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