What if this is not even platform capitalism anymore, but something worse? What if, on top of the political economy of capitalism, something else had emerged, even more abstract, even more total in its forms of exploitation? That would mean that, in addition to the strategies the labor movement and its allies have traditionally deployed against capital, we might need some new ones to address these recent elaborations of the form of exploitation. The key to these is not the ownership of the means of production (platform or otherwise) so much as control of the vector of information. This part of the ruling class divests itself of direct ownership in favor of information control. Moreover, it benefits from systematic, structural asymmetries of information, which it comes to own in the aggregate. One question this might pose is whether the tools of information control can be deployed otherwise. Whether we can go beyond analysis and build alternatives. Of whether labor can create its own vector of information in the shadow of these systematic platforms of extraction and domination.
Speakers
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Christine Gerber Researcher, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)
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Jonas Pentzien Ph.D. Researcher, Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IÖW)
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McKenzie Wark Professor of Culture and Media, The New School
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Trebor Scholz Researcher, author, New School professor, and Founding Director of the PCC
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Aman Bardia Assistant Director, Platform Cooperativism Consortium