Marx makes the interesting kind of comment. He says 'At some point,
technology is going to become a business.'
And I've always thought that was a very prescient
kind of comment. And I thought 'Well, Marx suggests that technology could
become a business, and we might want to explore the implications of that.'
But I've never really done it ,so I'm now going to do it, to ask 'If it's a business, what kind of
business is it?' What kind of technology is coming out of this and what is this technology being used
for? Well, there are benevolent uses of it and then there are some non-benevolent uses of it. And
I'd be a bit personal about this. I actually like my Alexa music system. It means I have access to
all of the jazz I want and all of the classical music I want, all the songs I want. I mean it's
fantastic, and I kind of think to myself, this has made my life- particularly under in the conditions
of the of the pandemic- much, much better. I can sit there [and] listen to this music. Or,
I can work listening to this music and so on. So the Alexa system is absolutely phenomenal in lots
of ways, and I'm kind of very grateful for it. Of course, it's monetized. I'm charged for it,
but now, what we're seeing is the monetization of everything and the creation of platforms-
complicated platforms where you want to watch something, but in order to get onto this platform,
you have to sign up. And they sign you up free, which is free for two weeks or something of that
kind. And then, of course the payment which you've authorized in order to get the free two
weeks then becomes a permanent payment and so on. So, suddenly you find yourself being sucked into
a whole kind of monetized world where it's very difficult to get out of. It's incredibly easy to
sign on to one of these platforms. It's incredibly difficult to get off it. What we start to see is
that actually a lot of the platforms right now and a lot of the work that's going on on the web is
is about finding ways to steal money. That's what it really amounts to: legally steal money
in some instances. In other instances, it's a downside shadier. Now, what good is this?
In what ways is this good? And to what good is that? I use this category in my own work of what
I call 'accumulation by dispossession'. That is, capitalists who accumulate not by making anything
or doing anything, but by stealing if in effect. Now this of course is something that happened
in the world of primitive accumulation way back in the origins of capitalism, but nowadays it's
happening. It's not primitive accumulation anymore. It's using technologies to try to
to suck out much as much value as possible. We see identity theft. We see
hackers and other all sorts of things of this kind going on. When we say that technology
becomes a business, it becomes a business with all sorts of negative characteristics
in terms of the internal organization of the labor process, and labor relations,
and social relations and all the rest of it. But it is also becoming a process which has some very
positive impacts and also some very negative impacts. Take for example Facebook. We know all
the stories about Facebook and how good it is and what it does for people. But at the same time, we
know that it has done some horrendous things. It plays a very important role in certain aspects of
politics. It has very negative features and monetization of access to a lot of this is
becoming, for me, somewhat oppressive. This question of technology then is a long-lasting
one within the history of capitalism. Yes, it starts very much with the industrial revolution.
Yes, it starts with inter-capitalist competition, interstate competition becomes terribly important,
then the way in which it becomes a business. A business in itself with a particular objective
and its objectives are mixed. Its objectives are to make a profit by any means possible,
and that means by stealing if necessary, by setting up scams, by setting up platforms which
you have to subscribe to if you just want to have access to what's going on in the world. These are
the sorts of issues which it seems to me need to be discussed, and debated and thought through.