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

["t byfield" <tbyfield@panix.com>]

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: