Jennifer Huberman has produced a thoughtful, nuanced essay on digital capitalism. As she insists, we cannot view this phenomenon through a single lens or narrative. Indeed, it is not clear that we can think of “digital capitalism” as a “thing” in the way that we think of, say, kinship or identity. Even without reading contemporary ethnography, sticking only to our own experience and media reports (and the ubiquitous social media), we see a wide range of “things” come down the pike: from cryptocurrency to virtual workplaces and everything else brought on by the confluence of more sophisticated communications technology, the demands of capitalism for new markets and cheaper labor sources, and of course Covid. As many pundits have declared, things will never get back to “normal,” even after Covid, if there is such a time. Those of us who have the option of working from afar will never give that up completely. Technologies and delivery systems that began as Covid workarounds will become permanent. We can screen new movies at home rather than go to the cinema. This accelerates trends that were already in place: simultaneous social isolation and immersion in social media, the replacement of face-to-face social relations with a highly curated performance of self via social media, and so forth. We have created our own Matrix.
What I have just written is, I think, true, as far as it goes, but it leaves out one small detail: the vast divide within the United States and also globally between those of us who are “knowledge workers” and those whose physical labor in the material world cannot be done virtually. This largely parallels the “digital divide” between households that have adequate hardware and connectivity to allow children to attend school from home via Zoom, and those who must, say, drive to a McDonalds to get free Wifi. In this way we see technology playing a role it has always played in capitalism: changing the rules of the game in a way that benefits some (in our case, not just the capitalists but the professional classes) at the expense of the workers. Just as the shift in the textile industry from piecework to industrial production took power away from workers in 19th-century England, so the new shifts are further disempowering workers, who are nonetheless told that they are “essential.” Amazon workers, for instance, truly are essential to the distribution system that has been set up and that we—the distance workers—rely on.
However, the divide between distance work and in-person work is not necessarily correlated with powerful vs. powerless. Indeed, many technology companies have a system reminiscent of piecework, where technology workers in India and elsewhere complete smaller tasks—coding, for instance—that will make up a larger project, but they are paid only for the precise amount of time spent on task, and not for time reflecting on a project or getting up to speed on a particular platform. In Italy, the high fashion industry likewise relies on piecework, often performed by immigrant women, paid at an absurdly low rate by iconic brands. So, no, there is not a single narrative of digital capitalism, but many. The one thing they all have in common is that, as in the past, technology—whatever utopian ideation we may associate with it (remember the 90 s anyone?)—is always on the side of the capitalists.
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David Graeber had a full career, although he died tragically young in the annus horribilis of 2020. He was known as a brilliant scholar and above all a public intellectual: theoretician to the Occupy movement, political provocateur. I knew him in graduate school, where he was an unforgettable presence. He was never one to shy at questioning assumptions, either within anthropology or in the wider society. He embraced anarchism as both a theoretical and political position. Along with his coauthor the archaeologist David Wengrow, he has written what may be the first blockbuster book in anthropology of the decade, perhaps the century. Although they would no doubt bristle at the comparison, it brings to mind Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature. They explicitly argue against such meta-narratives, but only by producing their own.
My main critique, as someone who has taught a course in political anthropology for three decades now, and who takes seriously the evolutionary model of political forms inherited from Morton Fried, is that the “standard model” contains considerably more nuance than the authors give credit for. They are taking this model, and all of the archaeological and ethnographic data associated with it, and reading it as if it were a version of the popular strategy game Civilization. Many scholars such as Robert Carneiro, Pierre Clastres, and James C. Scott have in fact emphasized the various types of oppositional structures and strategies for resisting or even opting out of state society. However, the authors redeem themselves by bringing in a wealth of new material, displaying remarkable knowledge of their topic, which will inevitably change the way we think about this question.
Brian Fagan and Nadia Durrani have written a deeply insightful essay on this book, which I feel we will be talking about for some time to come.