Wow, so many (lengthy) replies. Did not expects this amount of references. Will
get the books, read and hopefully gain some new knowledge on the way.
Thanks everyone!
Med venlig hilsen/Kind regards
Kasper Skov Christensen
Phone: 42 41 93 98
Ph.d. Student #digitaldesign @ Aarhus University Denmark
Design and Tech Consultant, Techno DJ and producer, Hacker
> On 26 Nov 2017, at 19:22, t byfield <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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
> <...>
>
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