James Muldoon has written a book, Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Futures, reviewed here, and was invited by the “Different Class” programme to join a seminar discussing it. When I first heard of the book, and read reviews I wasn’t impressed. A lot of what he said has been said before however on meeting him I think he has a great control over his material and can present it powerfully. I think he’s stronger on criticising the datenkraken than he is on suggesting alternative governance models and how to get there. He is keener on co-ops than nationalised corporations and we can understand why. I think that somewhere in here, there is a need to change company law such that the primacy of shareholder value is undermined. Theoreticians have argued for decades that companies serve at least four stakeholders; why should the needs of one have supremacy over the other three. Capitalism and shareholder value/fiduciary duty may have been appropriate when capital was scarce and the key economic question was how to use it but the world has moved on.
Certainly, I can see no justification for Uber appropriating the value from its drivers; it should be a co-op of the drivers. In fact, this is an argument that’s been going on for a while. An example is in the music business; there are arguments about how much value should accrue to the fans versus the artists versus the financiers.
Here are my notes and links …’
- jamesmuldoon.org, his web site
- Platform Socialism: How to Reclaim our Digital Future from Big Tech, the book, at Jstor.
- Feeding the machine: the hidden human labour powering AI, his next book, “Big Tech has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity.”
- E11 James Muldoon on Platform Socialism, at Future Histories International, a 1:40 podcast by James on the book
- Professor Jonathan White of LSE, chaired the seminar
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/24/yanis-varoufakis-technofeudalism-capitalism-ukraine-interview
- What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy by Steven Vallas, and Juliet B. Schor Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 46:273-294 (Volume publication date July 2020)
- Are We All Amazon Primed? Consumers and the Politics of Platform Power, Culpepper, P. D., & Thelen, K. (2020). Comparative Political Studies, 53(2), 288-318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019852687
- https://arenguseire.ee/en/reports/the-future-of-the-data-society-scenarios-up-to-2035/
- https://prospect.org/culture/books/2024-01-16-uber-impoverished-public-expectations-review/
- https://wisconsindot.gov/pages/travel/road/rideshare/default.aspx
There are others thinking about this
- Trebor Scholz, Associate Professor of Culture and Media at the New School, NYC, His book Uber-Worked and Underpaid. How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Polity, 2016) develops an analysis of the challenges posed by digital labor and introduces the concept of platform cooperativism as a way of joining the peer-to-peer and co-op movements with online labor markets while insisting on communal ownership and democratic governance