Platform algorithms automated capital’s command over all people, not just workers
Evidence
Then, cloud capital arrived. At one fell swoop it automated both roles. The exercise of capital’s power to command workers and consumers alike was handed over to the algos. This was a far more revolutionary step than replacing autoworkers with industrial robots. … After all, industrial robots simply do what automation has been doing since before the Luddites: making proletarians redundant, or more miserable, or both. No, the truly historic disruption was to automate capital’s power to command people outside the factory, the shop or the office – to turn all of us, cloud proles and everyone else, into cloud serfs in the direct (unremunerated) service of cloud capital, unmediated by any market. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 360
Categorization
- QUESTION: Is ‘automating command outside the factory’ genuinely historically novel, or does it extend Fordist social control? Worth probing against contrary labor-process histories.
- XREF: Echoes the Surplus-Repression and social-control themes in The Frankfurt School; also recalls Ambedkar’s point that caste is a modern system of graded control, here applied to platformity. — connects to: Platforms’ real novelty is making users unpaid laborers reproducing their own capital — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 339; Automation-triggered falling profit rates push capital toward social quantification as a new revenue stream — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 167; Economies of action get institutionalized into automated algorithms that modify behavior — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 939 (+8 more)
Broader Connections
- Economies of action get institutionalized into automated algorithms that modify behavior
#expands(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 939 - Platforms extract free labor from users in exchange for recognition and perks
#exemplifies(0.82) - Platforms look like markets but are centralized fiefs owned by algorithms
#corroborates(0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 868 - Algorithmic management strips workers of any human authority to contest discipline
#exemplifies(0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 119 - Social networks themselves constitute capital with measurable productive value
#corroborates(0.80) — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 33 - Platforms extract value from each transaction without absorbing employment obligations
#corroborates(0.78) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 220 - The audience commodity model makes nearly all waking time productive for capital
#corroborates(0.78) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 220 - Cloud capital uniquely combines attention-holding, free labour and privatised transaction spaces
#corroborates(0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 381 - Automation-triggered falling profit rates push capital toward social quantification as a new revenue stream
#expands(0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 167