{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","uuid":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","normalized_title":"digitalcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","isbns":["2021022153","9781032119182","9781032119205","9781003222149","2405518376"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":343,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Digital%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/search"},"page":{"printed_page":148,"pdf_page":162,"physical_index":162,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"a303f69a14222460d0acce68e676b391906fdecec2dcfc333f4a9c86353cb78a"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"(Lukács 1971, 10) and the totality. It fetishises “quantifiable ‘things’” (Lukács 1971, 90) such as capital, money, and commodities. Lefebvre stresses that commodity logic is “bound up with the general language of quantification” (CEL3, 56) that “quantification has conquered society in its entirety” (131) and that the “qualitative has virtually disappeared” (131) in everyday life.\n\nLukács and Lefebvre are both critics of positivism. They oppose dialectical thought to the positivist ideology. Positivism neglects and denies contradictions and the negative. In digital capitalism, digital positivism has emerged as a new ideology that fetishises big data and computing (Fuchs 2017). In this ideology, the collection of massive amounts of data and computing technology in general are seen and presented as the solutions to economic, political, and cultural problems. Digital positivism abstracts from alienation and the antagonisms of capitalist society.\n\nEspecially the second volume of Critique of Everyday Life tries to show how everyday life is manipulated by advertising, the capitalist media, and the capitalist press. There are strong parallels between Lefebvre’s critique, Debord’s (1967) critique of the spectacle, Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002) critique of the culture industry, and Marcuse’s (1964/1991) critique of one-dimensional man (see also Merrifield 2006, 25–26, 30–36; Schmidt 1972). For example, Lefebvre’s insight that the leisure and culture industry create “organized leisure and culture” (CEL3, 82) that is homogeneous, fragmented, and hierarchised (CEL3, part 1, chapter 8) resonates with Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002, xi, xii) insight that the culture industry creates an “administered world”. For Lefebvre, socialism in contrast to capitalist everyday life means the strengthening of the right to difference, equality in difference, and unity (CEL3, part 1, chapter 8). Taken together, this means he argues for a programme of unity in diversity as opposed to unity without diversity and diversity without unity.\n\nLefebvre speaks of “the manipulation of the consumer and of his needs by advertising and propaganda” (CEL2, 146) and says that new technologies and consumer capitalism have colonised everyday life (11). He extends the notion of alienation from labour to leisure (CEL1, 39) He points out that “‘consumer society’ manipulates needs; the masters of production are also the masters of consumption, and they also produce the demands for which and according to which they are supposed to be producing” (CEL2, 223). There is not a self-regulating market driven by demand and supply but a capitalist system that the capitalist class consciously controls and manipulates in order to accumulate capital. Capitalist leisure is dominated by images and films that promise to distract and “compensate for the difficulties of everyday life” (CEL1, 33), especially those that exist in respect to labour. The culture industry produces illusory reverse images that create a “false world” that presents itself as true and tries to replace “real unhappiness by fictions of happiness” (CEL1, 35).\n\n148\n\nTheorists","previous_page":147,"next_page":149}