Capital in the Age of Technology

Taken from In These Times — https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/20836/tech-workers-union-labor-movement-silicon-valley-facebook-google

For all of human history, a person’s relationship to the means of production defined their social, political, and economic status. In the industrial age this truth was made more obvious than ever before. Because one class controlled the factories and owned the fields, they could dictate the conditions of labor and profit from its fruits. Laborers needed these “means of production” to produce goods, so they had no choice but to alienate themselves from their products and accept less than the value they produced as compensation.

To the seasoned Marxists among my readers, I apologize for the quick and incomplete review. However, in order to understand how this dynamic shifted with modernity, we need to understand this basic historical precedent. For three centuries, the control of capital has allowed one class to exploit another. Though that simple fact has not changed, its form is continuously evolving.

Today, the material conditions of the global north vary drastically from their industrial roots. Industrial production has slowed, and most workers now provide services rather than products. Nowhere is this shift more visible than in the realm of technology. In this brave new world, the means of production cannot be easily contained. Every person with a computer is capable of coding. Open source and free development software means nearly everyone has a means of production.

In order to account for this development, capitalists have been forced to shift their mechanisms of control — and have done so with great success. 6 of the world’s largest 20 corporations are tech and software firms. For an industry that has only existed on a consumer scale for just over 30 years, this constitutes incredible growth. However, this was not achieved through control of factories, but instead through the domination of intellectual property, advertisement, and most essentially, the means of distribution.

Apple, for example, is keenly aware that its software empire is under constant threat from third party coders. Everything from its operating systems to individual applications could potentially be out-compete by aspiring coders. Their solution has been two fold — coopt developers when possible, and when all else fails, force them out of the market altogether. Compared to Android OS, IOS is draconian. Its monthly updates thwart attempts at jailbreaking. It forbids apps outside of the Apple store from competing on its platform without those jailbreaks. And crucially Apple charges a steep fee for developers to access its marketplace.

The capitalists who own Apple are able to exploit developers in a manner which directly parallels the exploitation of 20th century factory labor. Because indie devs lack the capital for advertisement budgets and are not guaranteed access to Apple’s marketplace, they are forced to surrender a portion of the value they produce to a capitalist class. Though the means of production have become ubiquitous, the means of distribution have been seized.

This helps explain why so many popular apps are clones dedicated to microtransactions and devoid of content. In order to overcome the barriers to distribution while also making enough to live, developers must alienate themselves from the act of creation and dedicate themselves to menial cash-grabs. Just as the cobbler’s of Paris were replaced with desolate shoe factories, so is the indie-dev being replaced with soulless code-recyclers.

Though this shift in the mode of capitalist accumulation is most obvious in the world of technology, it extends well beyond it. Online marketplaces like Etsy and Ebay use their control of distribution and advertisement to steal labor value from small-time crafters. Amazon uses its market to extract wealth from self-published novelists. Uber and Lyft use their control of driving apps to extort wealth from drivers. These laborers are forced to rely on means of distribution which are owned by a capitalist class, so instead of receiving the full value of their products, they receive a fraction.