A bit later, more critical understandings of digital capitalism were developed. Schiller (1999) published the first book that contained the term “digital capitalism” in its title: Digital Capitalism. Networking the Global Market System. He sees the Internet as a means of the globalisation of capitalism:
Networks are directly generalizing the social and cultural range of the capitalist economy as never before. That is why I refer to this new epoch as one of digital capitalism. The arrival of digital capitalism has involved radical social, as well as technological, changes. […] As it comes under the sway of an expansionary market logic, the Internet is catalyzing an epochal politicaleconomic transition toward what I call digital capitalism – and toward changes that, for much of the population, are unpropitious. (Schiller 1999, xiv, xvii)
A variety of publications analysing digital capitalism has been published (see, e.g., Betancourt 2015, Daum 2017, Meier 2019, Pace 2018, Sadowski 2020, Seidl 2021, Staab 2019, Staab and Nachtwey 2016, Wajcman 2015).
Many of such works understand digital capitalism as an economic order. Here are some examples.
Betancourt (2015, 75) understands digital capitalism as “a new type of automated, immaterial production”. Daum (2017) characterises digital capitalism as “a new accumulation model”. For Pace (2018), digital capitalism is an “economic system” (p. 259) and economic “mode of production” (p. 259) consisting of the digital mediation of particular forms of property, markets, production styles, accumulation styles, and management styles (p. 260). Seidl (2021, 14) understands digital capitalism as “data-driven, and artificial-intelligence-powered business models”. Staab (2019) characterises digital capitalism as privatised mercantilism, a specific “praxis of economic action”.
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Introduction