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# Digital Capitalism

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• Nationalism: Trump constructs a national “we”-identity of US citizens that is directed against Mexico by speaking of “our country”, “our Marine”, “our own” interest, or “we as a nation”. Trump presents us/them-difference, where “we” US-Americans are opposed to Mexicans and “their country”;

• Militarism: Trump speaks of “our Marine” who “is locked in a Mexican jail” in order to argue that US soldiers are individuals of highest honour because they take up arms to enforce US interests. Trump in general idolises soldiers and the military. In his ideology, the soldier is the ideal type of a human being. Whereas he considers US state violence as appropriate, he decries the use of Mexican law against US citizens, implying that it is unjust to prosecute US soldiers for breaking Mexican laws. Trump fuses militarism with nationalism and racist prejudices in order to create the impression that there is a national conflict between Mexico and the USA;

• Strong leadership: Finally, Trump argues that Illegal immigration and the alleged destruction of the US nation (“a country that cannot protect its borders will not last”) is due to Obama’s alleged weak leadership (“We don’t have leadership in any capable capacity”) and “open door”-policy “at the Mexican border”. Trump implicitly suggests that he himself would be a strong leader (“The problem is easy to solve with leadership”) and thereby anticipated his own candidacy in the 2016 US presidential election.

In order to be effective, ideologies need to be reproduced in the form of a constant flow of tabloid news, scandals, revelations, etc. Right-wing forces make use of social media for spreading the ideologies of top-down leadership, nationalism, the friend/enemy-scheme, and militarism/law & order-politics. Social media is a suited medium for spreading fake news and far-right propaganda because it is brief and superficial, operates at high speed, can reach a vast number of potential users in a short time by making postings spread in a networked information space, supports the amplification of emotions in the form of “likes” and other emoticons, and appeals to individuals’ interest in sensationalism. The tabloid-like structure of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube supports the online spread of right-wing ideology. Capitalist social media have tolerated right-wing propaganda because vast flows of content and data promise higher profits from targeted ads. Social media is not the cause of the proletariat’s reified consciousness in the contemporary world, but it is one of the communication tools that right-wing demagogues employ for spreading their ideologies. The very cause of the rise of the far-right is that capitalist politics have backfired and created a negative dialectic, in which the freedom of the market has intensified fears and inequalities that express themselves in support for far-right ideologies, politicians, movements, and parties. Of course, also democrats and leftwing activists use social media for trying to challenge far-right ideology and communicate different stories and worldviews. But without a doubt, right-wing authoritarian ideology has contributed to a sustained reification of the proletariat’s consciousness so that the rootedness of social problems in capitalism’s very structure is veiled.

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Anti-fascists and anti-racists contest right-wing authoritarianism online. There are not just the likes of Breitbart on social media, but also groups and individuals such as Hope Not Hate (around 100k followers on Twitter), Democratic Socialists of America (around 250k Twitter-followers), Black Lives Matter (around 350k Twitter-followers), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (around 450k Twitterfollowers), etc. that challenge racism and right-wing extremism and run online campaigns. An example is the International Day Against Fascism and Antisemitism (9 November) that uses hashtags such as #SpeakUpNow, #FightFascism, #9November, #DayAgainstFascism, and #DayAgainstAntisemitism.

The next section will based on HCC discuss the relationship of journalism and reification and will relate HCC to digital phenomena such as social media, online fake news, targeted advertising, algorithms, and political bots.

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Ideology and Reified Consciousness

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3.3 Journalism and Reification

Lukács on Journalism

Ideology does not exist independent from human beings but must be constantly produced and reproduced in social relations. Lukács mentions bourgeois journalists as producers of ideology. By “bourgeois” journalists, we mean journalists who create stories that reify capitalism and domination with the help of various ideological strategies. Bourgeois journalism is a particular type of ideological labour, labour that creates ideological news stories.

Lukács argues that physical workers experience reification relatively directly. Their labour “directly possesses the naked and abstract form of the commodity, while in other forms of work this [reification] is hidden behind the façade of ‘mental labour’, of ‘responsibility’, etc.” (HCC, 172). “The more deeply reification penetrates into the soul of the man who sells his achievement as a commodity the more deceptive appearances are (as in the case of journalism)” (HCC, 172). Journalists’ love of their work and their ethos as democracy’s fourth estate that guarantees freedom of expression and opinion and tries to make power transparent and tries to prevent the abuse of power, can easily veil their status as wage-workers.

In HCC, Lukács remarks in one passage: “The journalist’s ‘lack of convictions’, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification” (HCC, 100). As a result, the news produced by bourgeois journalism often reifies capitalism and domination. In a footnote to the passage just cited, Lukács (HCC, 210, footnote 24) refers to an essay by Béla Fogarasi (without mentioning its title). Fogarasi (1891–1959) was like Lukács a member of the Hungarian Communist Party. They were both members of the “Sunday Circle”, an intellectual discussion group that existed from 1915 until 1918 in Budapest. Fogarasi’s (1921/1983) essay “Tasks of the Communist Press”, to which Lukács refers, was published in 1921.

The essay distinguishes between the capitalist and the communist press and argues that the capitalist press is “an ideological weapon in the class struggle” (p. 149) utilised by the bourgeoisie in order to dominate “the ideology of the ensemble of classes” (p. 149).

What the capitalist press seeks is to shape the structure of the reader’s consciousness in such a way that he will be perpetually unable to distinguish between true and false, to relate causes and effects, to place individual facts in their total context, to rationally integrate new knowledge into his perspective. (Fogarasi 1921/1983, 150)

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Fogarasi implicitly applies Lukács’ critique of reified consciousness to the capitalist press. In the capitalist press, the focus is often not on the dialectic of totality, particularity, and individuality, but merely on individual, isolated pieces of news. According to Fogarasi, strategies of the capitalist press include to report a multitude of isolated facts that shall quench the readers’ thirst for knowledge, de-politicisation, and sensationalism that work systematically in the service of distraction, and pseudoobjectivity. In contrast, the communist press tries to advance the consciousness of society as totality and of the relation of single events with each other and broader contexts, the unmasking of the capitalist press, and the participation of readers as producers of reports.

Fogarasi not just applied Lukács’ concepts of reification and the totality to journalism, but also in 1921 anticipated Benjamin’s (1934, 777) idea of turning “consumers […] into producers” and “readers or spectators into collaborators” as well as Brecht’s (1932, 42) idea of a radio that lets “the listener speak as well as hear”. Fogarasi’s essay also points out aspects of ideology in the media that resonate with Lukács notions of ideology and reified consciousness.

The next two sub-sections will show that Lukács’ analyses of news and journalism as reified consciousness remain topical in the contemporary age of the Internet, social media, and fake news.

The New Spirit of Capitalism

In contemporary capitalism, creative workers’ love of the content of their labour and the high degree of self-determination has become a new ideology that veils the fact that those, who can do what they love, often do so under precarious conditions. Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) speak in this context of the “new spirit of capitalism”. The new spirit of capitalism is a management ideology that promises to workers to conduct labour that features “autonomy, spontaneity, rhizomorphous capacity, multitasking (in contrast to the narrow specialization of the old division of labour), conviviality, openness to others and novelty, availability, creativity, visionary intuition, sensitivity to differences, listening to lived experience and receptiveness to a whole range of experiences, being attracted to informality and the search for interpersonal contacts” – qualities that “are taken directly from the repertoire of May 1968” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, 97).

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The new spirit of capitalism promises to knowledge workers less alienated labour, by which they can live the life of an artist, celebrity, or journalist. A range of studies has shown that knowledge workers in media industries see their labour as highly creative, self-determined and self-fulfilling, but that it is at the same time often highly precarious<sup>5</sup> Gill (2011) summarises the results of such studies by identifying ten features of cultural and media labour: such labour is often characterised by (1) love of the work, (2) the entrepreneurial aspiration to innovate and pioneer, (3) is often short-term, precarious and insecure, (4) is characterised by low pay and (5) long hours, (6) requires that workers constantly develop their knowledge and skills, (7) is based on DIY learning and (8) informality, (9) features inequalities relating to gender, age, class, race, ethnicity and disability, and (10) deprives workers of the time and resources necessary to plan their future.

Cultural and media labour appears to be less reified and alienated than manual labour, but is often organised as precarious freelancing that does not provide adequate social, job, and income security. The ideology of conducting labour that is creative and innovative can reify the consciousness of cultural workers so that they do not see themselves as workers, but entrepreneurs, are hostile to unionisation, see precarity as their individual fault and not a class relation imposed by capitalism, etc. The new spirit of capitalism is a new ideology that reifies labour by creating the appearance of dealienation and at the same time imposes highly individualised working conditions that undermine social and income security. It is a new form of alienation that appears to be unalienated. Whether workers’ reaction to this new ideology is reified or non-reified consciousness, depends among several factors on the question whether they can be collectively politically organised and develop critical consciousness that lets them see through the capitalist reality behind the false appearances.

Especially young precarious workers in the cultural sector have tried to fight back against neoliberalism by reinvigorating the cooperative movement. Cultural cooperatives are self-managed companies that are collectively owned and governed by their workers (see http://cultural.coop/) (Sandoval 2016). In the realm of the Internet, there have been experiments with platform co-operatives (Scholz and Schneider 2016).

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5 For an overview see the contributions in Maxwell (2016).

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The Age of Online Fake News

Advertising-funded media focus on sensationalism and entertainment in order to attract and sell audiences and tend to feature pro-capitalist and conservative worldviews. Google, Facebook, and Twitter use targeted advertising, which allows to personalise and individualise ads with the help of digital surveillance and big data analytics. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown how the targeted ad-based model of digital capitalism collides with democracy: in 2013, University of Cambridge neuroscientist Aleksandr Kogan began to use Facebook’s developer platform in order to conduct a personality quiz. As a result, personal data of around 90 million users was collected and sold to Cambridge Analytica, a company whose vice-president was Steve Bannon. Cambridge Analytica used the data for targeting users with fake news in election campaigns, which has been widely seen as the attempt to manipulate democracy. In the light of Cambridge Analytica, critical studies of online fake news and post-truth online have proliferated (see e.g. Duffy et al. 2019; Humprecht 2019; Carlson 2020). Facebook has as a consequence come under public scrutiny in 2018 because it seems to have known about the use of its targeting mechanism for anti-democratic activities. Targeted online advertising allows large corporations to manipulate and colonise the public sphere by using their advertising budgets for targeting users with corporate and political propaganda. In the online world, native advertising and branded content make it difficult to discern advertising from editorial content, which undermines journalistic autonomy.

Selective sourcing that benefits elites and the capitalist class constitutes a news filter. Online communication other than mass media is based on a decentralised communication infrastructure, where in principle everyone can produce and disseminate information. In the online world, the power hierarchy and class structuration shift from the production of content to the production of visibility and attention. Corporations, celebrities, traditional and new elites dominate online visibility and online attention (see Fuchs 2017, 122–128). For example, in July 2018 Luis Fonsi’s music video “Despacito” was with 5 billion and 368 million views the most accessed YouTube video of all time.<sup>6</sup> Universal Music Latin Entertainment, a division of the Universal Music Group that is owned by Vivendi, is the publisher of Fonsi’s song and video, which shows that big multimedia corporations play a dominant role on YouTube. Given that corporate social media are advertising-based, attention can be purchased as a commodity, which benefits wealthy corporations and individuals.

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6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJQP7kiw5Fk, accessed on 29 July 2018.

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Fake news is as old as the tabloid press, but in the online world fake news can spread quickly, can be individually targeted, and it is often hard to distinguish if online behaviour in the context of fake news is conducted by humans or algorithms. Right-wing movements try to make use of social media for spreading their propaganda and challenging socialist and liberal political positions and worldviews online. They not just use bots and traditional lobbying methods online, but often also resort to threats, bullying, and hate speech.

Bourgeois media often, but not exclusively spread ideology. In section three, we have already seen an example of how nationalist and xenophobic ideology is spread online. Ideology on the Internet tends to be visual and tabloidised. It makes use of strategies such as simplification, the use of only a few words, emotionalisation, scandalisation, polarisation, banalisation, manipulation, fabrication, etc. User-generated ideology means that the labour of producing ideology is not confined to professional ideologues, but has penetrated everyday life. Ideologies are sensational, populist, simplistic, emotional, and directly address particular groups. Algorithms amplify the views of those who gain high levels of attention. As a consequence, we find the online tendency of the algorithmic amplification of online ideologies.

The actions of corporations, celebrities, and political elites result in the colonisation of the public sphere. These processes also operate in the online world and on social media, where targeted advertising, algorithms, big data, political bots, fake online news, digital surveillance, and other mechanisms are used and result in the corporate and political stratification of the Internet.

Fake news has been challenged by developments such as fact-checking organisations and the quest for building a public service Internet that consists of non-commercial platforms that do not have a for-profit imperative but want to benefit the public by reliable news, information, and educational resources that are provided online and engage users (Fuchs 2018a, 2018b).

In the next section, we will see that communication technologies are not just a medium for the communication and challenging of reified thought, but also form an object of reification. Lukács’ work will be used for showing how one can analyse ideologies of the Internet and digital media.

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3.4 The Reification of Communication Technologies

Lukács on Intellectual Workers

In the essay “Intellectual Workers” and the Problem of Intellectual Leadership, written in 1919, Lukács (2014, 12–18) argues that intellectual workers do not form a separate class. Those “who, like manual workers, are able to participate in production only by means of their labour power (white-collar workers, engineers, etc.)” differ

sharply from those whose intellectual work is only an accessory to their bourgeois status (major share-holders, factory owners). The class distinction between these two groups is so clear to the objective observer that it is impossible to bring them together under one heading, as the class of “intellectual workers”. (Lukács 2014, 12)

“Those ‘intellectual workers’ who participate in production therefore belong (with an unclear class consciousness, at best) to the same class as the manual workers” (Lukács 2014, 13). Intellectual workers are not “a homogeneously structured class, since even within their ranks a clear division into oppressors and oppressed” (Lukács 2014, 13) can be found.

Knowledge Workers in the Information Society

In discussions of the “information society” (Webster 2014), a distinction among the agricultural sector, the manufacturing sector, and the service sector is frequently made. As part of this division, information and knowledge workers are often said to form a distinct group within the service sector. The problem of this argument is, as Lukács indicates, that managers who sustain the control of workers and represent the capitalist interest are said to share the same position in the production process as productive knowledge workers, who directly create commodities that are sold in order to yield profit.

Today, the class character of knowledge workers has become even more complex because many creative workers have the status of freelancers: they sell their labour via one-time contracts and do not have the capital necessary to employ others. Freelancing is especially prevalent among knowledge workers such as data inputters, software and web developers, designers, translators, writers, personal assistants, editors, and proofreaders. Such workers sell their labour-power and yield profit for others. As long as a freelancer does not form a business that besides him- or herself also employs others, there is no doubt that s/he is part of the working class. Journalists are either wage-workers or, increasingly, freelancers. Their position in the production process on the one hand makes them part of the working class. But journalists, consultants, and others who serve, as Lukács writes, “material, ideological and power interests” (Lukács 2014, 13) by justifying capitalist interests in their writings, are just like managers part of the ruling class. Only the critical journalists, who investigate capitalism critically, is fully part of the working class and not part of the ruling class.

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Fake news has been challenged by developments such as fact-checking organisations and the quest for building a public service Internet that consists of non-commercial platforms that do not have a for-profit imperative but want to benefit the public by reliable news, information, and educational resources that are provided online and engage users (Fuchs 2018a, 2018b).

Lukács’ Critique of Technological Fetishism in the Age of Big Data Capitalism

There are not just ideologies that are communicated with the help of technologies, but also ideologies of technologies. In respect to digital technologies, we do not just find ideologies on the Internet, but also ideologies of the Internet. Lukács does not use the term “technological fetishism”, but describes how technologies are turned into fetish objects. He speaks of “the exploitation for particular human ends (as in technology, for example) of […] fatalistically accepted and immutable laws” (HCC, 38). Technological fetishism distorts the machine’s “true objective nature by representing its function in the capitalist production process as its ‘eternal’ essence” (HCC, 153).

In the age of digital capitalism, digital technologies such as the Internet, social media platforms, the mobile phone, big data technologies, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, industry 4.0/industrial Internet, etc. are often treated as technological fetishes in bourgeois thought. Let us consider an example. The business press is in general a good source for observing the newest trends in bourgeois ideology.

In May 2017, The Economist ran a cover story under the title “The World’s Most Valuable Resource is no Longer Oil, but Data”: “A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry. […] A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era” (The Economist 2017). Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft are “titans” that “look unstoppable”. “The giants’ success has benefited consumers. Few want to live without Google’s search engine, Amazon’s one-day delivery or Facebook’s newsfeed”. “Algorithms can predict when a customer is ready to buy, a jet-engine needs servicing or a person is at risk of a disease”. Fortune published an interview on big data with Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich. He said: “Oil changed the world in the 1900s. It drove cars, it drove the whole chemical industry. […] Data, I look at it as the new oil. It’s going to change most industries across the board” (Gharib 2018). Artificial Intelligence-based data is “not just gonna change business, it’s gonna change every person on this planet’s life in some positive way”. “I think if you go and talk to the employees, they’ve never seen the company on this level of pace of change and competitiveness. But I don’t think you can ever stand still and say that it’s fast enough in this technology world”.

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These examples show some typical features of technological fetishism:

• Autonomy: Technology is presented as being autonomous from society’s power structures. Technology is not situated in society as totality. In the two examples, there is predominantly a focus on how new technologies such as big data technologies and Artificial Intelligence positively change society without a focus on how they are embedded into class structures, exploitation, and domination;

• Subjectivity: Technology and not humans are presented as a subject that acts (“Oil changes”, etc., Data is “going to change most industries”, AI “changes every person on this planet’s life”). The purpose of this strategy is to reify technological developments as inevitable, unchangeable, unavoidable and irreversible by presenting them as independent from human will and action;

• Revolution: Technological developments are presented as revolutionary, as taking place rapidly and as changing everything (“Data” as the “new oil”, “data, the oil of the digital era”, “this level of pace of change” is never “fast enough in this technology world”). The goal of this strategy of presentation is that humans do not question undoing certain technologies or aspects of them;

• Technology as one-dimensional cause, digital determinism: Technology is said to be the cause of changes in society (“it’s gonna change every person on this planet’s life in some positive way”). Power structures and social contradictions are disregarded;

• Technological optimism/pessimism: Changes in society that stand in the context of technology are said to be either purely positive (technological optimism) or purely negative (technological pessimism). In the examples, it is for example claimed that big data “has benefited consumers. Few want to live without” it. Or that algorithms can predict when a person is “at risk of a disease” and “change every person’s […] life in some positive way”. There is no talk about actual or potential harms such as algorithmic surveillance, algorithmic discrimination, disadvantages arising from errors and false predictions, etc.

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