The tech sectorâs GDP and employment footprints are surprisingly small
Evidence
The value that the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector contributes to national gross domestic product (GDP) reveals relatively small figures, which are at odds with the enthusiasm exhibited by market capitalization. This sector (of which the social quantification subsector would only be a subsegment) has added merely 6.8% of value to the US economy in recent years. In a report that pools data for 2006 and 2014 from developed countries in the European Union, North America, and Asia, only Taiwan and South Korea had percentages in excess of 6% (13.3/15.9% and 9.2/8.9%, respectively). Between 1994 and 2014, ICT was only 2.6% of GDP in twenty countries surveyed by the OECD, with an average growth across those countries of 16.7%. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, two supposed leaders of the digital transformation, ICT investment as a percentage of GDP actually fell in this period, to 3.15% and 2.17%, respectively (OECD, âShare of ICTâ). As far as the industryâs impact on employment rates, it is calculated that worldwide the ICT sector and the consumer electronics sector together employ nearly two hundred million workers, with another two hundred million if we add mining and labor-intensive work (Maxwell and Miller, Greening the Media, 106.). This might sound like a lot, but when we isolate the social quantification sector, the overall picture changes. Figures for the year 2000 show that the industries involved in the ICT sector accounted for only 3.9% of employment in the European Union and 4.9% in the United States (Doogan, New Capitalism?, 59), with those numbers in fact decreasing over time. According to the OECD report, by 2014 the figure for the European Union had gone down to 2.5%, and the report identifies only Taiwan as showing an employment rate in this sector above 10%. A look at how many full-time employees were actually employed by social quantification corporations reveals a very small number: Airbnbâ1,917 employees in the United States, according to 2016 reports; Appleâapproximately 123,000 as of September 2017; Facebookâ23,165 as of September 2017; Google (Alphabet)â72,053 as of December 2016 (keeping in mind that half of Googleâs workers are contractors who donât receive full benefits: cf. Bergen and Eidelson, âInside Googleâ); Instagram (a Facebook company)â450 as of January 2017; Snapchatâ1,859 as of December 2016; Twitterâapproximately 3,860 as of June 2016; and Uberâapproximately 12,000 as of June 2017 (all figures comes from corporate websites). It should be noted that both Google and Facebook are adding about 10,000 employees each to act as moderators in the aftermath of the fake news scandal (Naughton, âDirty Workâ). Of course, these figures do not take into account all the workers involved in datafication both inside and outside the social quantification sector, including part-time and freelance workers. But to put things in perspective, Walmart and McDonaldâs each employ about two million people worldwide. Only Amazon comes close to that magnitude, with 541,900 employees as of October 2017.
â Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 826
Categorization
XREF: Connects to the attention/surveillance schoolâs assumption that platforms are enormous economic engines â this data challenges that, helping map where data colonialism diverges from platform-power frames. â connects to: Tech companies employ far fewer workers than mid-century industrial giants â Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 15; Surveillance capitalist firms operate on a hyperscale pattern with tiny workforces. â Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1588
SEED: Angle: âThe gig economyâs big numbers are illusoryâ â contrast the trillion-dollar market caps against the tiny employee counts and GDP shares.