A single narrative will not do: Capitalism in the digital age

Abstract

In recent years, scholars working across a range of disciplines have become increasingly interested in exploring the contours and machinations of digital capitalism. Celebrants extoll the way digital technologies are enhancing processes of capital accumulation, rendering employment more flexible, democractizing innovation, and making new forms of economic co-operation possible. By contrast, skeptics warn that digital technologies are being used to exacerbate inequality, further capitalist domination and extraction, and automate human beings into a future where there is no escape from the ubiquitous surveillance technologies that are used to forward the interests of a powerful techno-elite. The four books I review in this essay all offer critical perspectives on capitalism in the digital age. However, when read collectively, these books also demonstrate that if we are going to enhance our understanding of digital capitalism, then a single narrative will not do. By exploring the different ways digital capitalism is produced, lived, and even resisted by those who are differentially positioned within its ambit, these books make a powerful case for the role anthropology can play in illuminating the complexities, and the transformative possibilities, of our current economic moment.

Keywords:

• Digital capitalism
• technology
• extraction
• on-demand labor
• digital money

Notes

1 For example, see Bourgois 1995; Hoschild 1983; Kjareulff 2015; Lem 2001; Muehlebach 2011; Sopranzeti 2017.

2 For anthropological writings on finance see Appadurai 2016; Hart and Ortiz 2014; Ho 2009; Maurer 2013; Zaloom 2006. For anthropological studies of neoliberal reforms see Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; Dávila 2004: Ferguson 2005; Ganti 2014; Greenhouse 2012; Ong 2006.

3 See for instance, Calo and Rosenblat 2017; Cockayne, 2016; Crouch 2019; Dyer-Witheford 2015; Fuchs 2019; Jordan 2015; Schiller 1999; Schor 2020; Srnicek 2017; Van Dijck 2014; Zuboff 2019.

4 Of course, for many years now, social theorists have been arguing that work no longer provides one of the primary co-ordinates of identity and thus the changes Gray and Suri chronicle might not be so impactful. However, the changes Gray and Suri chronicle feel so drastic that they leave me wondering if “work” will matter at all in the future.

5 One, who paradoxically, might be more reminiscent of premodern people and times that James Carrier has described in his writings on the emergence of capitalist society. See Carrier 1995.

6 As James Smith notes, this was an idea he encountered several times when shopping his book manuscript to different presses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenny Huberman

JENNY HUBERMAN is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research interests are wide-ranging and her books include Ambivalent Encounters: Children, Tourists and Social Change in Banaras, India (Rutgers University Press 2012), Transhumanism: From Ancestors to Avatars (Cambridge University Press 2021) and The Spirit of Digital Capitalism (Forthcoming, Polity Press).