- Anti-corporate techlash. Many of these concerns have converged in a nebulous ‘techlash’ against the power of the large digital corporations. Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the Russian cyber-war scandals in the 2016 US election catalysed a revival of long-dormant discussions about concentration of ownership in digital oligopolies (Foer 2017; Mosco 2017). Even within a US high-technology community famously opposed to state regulation, voices expressed scepticism as to the capacities of Google and Facebook to police themselves and called for enforced transparency and even financial liability for the negative externalities of their algorithmic processes. Other criticisms went deeper – asking, for example, about the degree to which capital’s media corporations are deeply and basically dependent on the ‘fake news’ of advertising and on highly engineered attention manipulation. In Europe, litigation was launched against the giants of digital capitalism over violations of public regulation and labour law, tax evasion and anticompetitive abuse of monopolistic powers. Calls for the disaggregation and regulation of some of the largest AI-developing corporations appeared in the platforms of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn (and even, erratically, in the ruminations of right-wing authoritarian populists such as Trump). Antitrust politics are by no means the same as anti-capitalism, but one effect of the ‘mainstreaming’ of such concerns has been to open up a space for discussion of more radical propositions for a ‘socialization of the data banks’ (Morozov 2015). These extend beyond the regulation or breakup of oligopolies to the establishment of ‘commons’ institutions separate from both state and market, and the formation of public computing utilities kept at arm’s length from governmental and corporate power. We return to these issues in the Conclusion. By 2018 even business commentators were speaking of changed attitudes towards digital capital as one of an array of factors, alongside gadget-saturated markets and international trade wars, that were giving high-tech a ‘hammering’ on that infallible index of human values, the stock market (Rajan 2018).
automating the social factory
107