{"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":62,"pdf_page":76,"physical_index":76,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"4dfec4e9f86e072c10a6e5e2a3e2ad6b3af2a129c337a4234b2ab29d6cae7adf"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"Engels stresses that there are different ways of how workers react to their exploitation. “To escape despair, there are but two ways open to him [the worker]; either inward and outward revolt against the bourgeoisie or drunkenness and general demoralization. And the English operatives are accustomed to take refuge in both”, which resulted in “hundreds of uprising against machinery and the bourgeoisie” (CWCE, 149). At the time when Engels wrote CWCE, the struggles of the working class were particularly focused on the introduction of the ten hours working day. Engels, again and again, refers to these struggles (CWCE, 179, 182–185, 242, 313). Such struggles resulted in the introduction of the Ten Hours Bill 1847 that limited the working day for women and teenagers to a maximum of ten hours.\n\nEngels sees crime as a purely individual reaction and the destruction of machinery as limited to one single dimension of capital’s rule. He propagates the unity of economicclass struggles and political-class struggles. He argues for the “union of Socialism with Chartism, the reproduction of French Communism in an English manner”. In digital capitalism, there is a large number of different cybercrimes, the crime that is committed using digital technologies such as the Internet (see Wall 2007 for an overview discussion of cybercrime). Many Internet users every day receive spam and online scams via e-mails, which are the most widely spread forms of cybercrime. Such forms of cybercrime are not the reactions of a disenfranchised working class, but highly profitable capitalist businesses.\n\nMachine breaking means the resistance against the introduction of machinery and “revolts against machinery” (CWCE, 222). In industrialising England, machine breaking was known as “Luddism”, a movement named after its founder Ned Ludd. “This form of opposition also was isolated, restricted to certain localities, and directed against one feature only of our present social arrangements” (CWCE, 222). In the book The Making of the English Working Class, the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson (1966) makes a more positive assessment of the Luddite movement than Engels (see also Fuchs 2016, 2000–2004). He writes that Luddism was not a blind attack on machinery as end-in-itself, but a well-organised movement that attacked the machines of capitalists that laid-off workers (Thompson 1966, 564). Luddism was a working-class struggle for “a democratic community, in which industrial growth should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of profit be subordinated to human needs” (Thompson 1966, 552).\n\nIn digital capitalism, one can, again and again, hear suggestions and see initiatives that call for stopping to use of digital technologies. An example is digital detoxing, the conscious choice to stop using digital technologies for certain periods of time. The problem with such strategies is that they often are technophobic and technodeterministic. They see digital technologies as such as the cause of stress, health problems, depression, loneliness, etc. They abstract from the capitalist, class and power relations that shape contemporary digital technologies. Digital detox retreats have turned into a new form of capital accumulation, where stressed digital workers pay for switching off their phones and laptops for a weekend or a week. For example, the three-day digital detox retreat at The Detox Barn in Suffolk (UK) costs £415 per person “for three nights (Friday – Monday) including all meals, two yoga sessions, smoothie demos, guided country walks and guided meditation”.<sup>2</sup> Deceleration, digital detox and digital Luddism are capital accumulation strategies. They advance the very cause of the stress and problems that digital workers suffer – capitalism.\n\n62\n\nTheorists","previous_page":61,"next_page":63}