Countering current claims that digital capitalism is issuing in a"neo-feudal"age,as the rentier barons of Silicon Valley and Wall Street are extracting non-productive fortunes from their users and debtors,the author of this article delves into the landmark Brenner Debate,starting from feudalist logics and Habermas's concept of"refeudalization",analyzes the capitalist essence of exploitation,appropriation and dispossession at the stage of primitive accumulation,and points out that unlike the"accumulation via innovation"caused by the systemic pressures exerted on capitalists,David Harvey's concept of"accumulation by dispossession"has become the dominant form of accumulation in the new era.The article argues that modem finance is overtaken by the logic of dispossession and the logic of parasitism,and by establishing control over intellectual property rights and intangibles-including data holdings,today's capitalists have become rentiers,entirely parasitic on the creativity of the masses without ever being directly involved in the productive process.The rise of data has given birth to a massive digital economy,and the digital giants such as Google and Facebook manage to appropriate huge chunks of the global mass of surplus value through the user-data-advertising connection.In addition,the article questions Shoshana Zuboff's"surveillance capitalism",stating that it has no radical political agenda and cannot grasp just how the non-capitalist digital economy might operate in the future.It also criticizes the practice of techno-feudalism that excluded the state out of the analytical framework and understated the important role played by the United States in the rise of Silicon Valley as a global techno-economic hegemon.
digital CapitalismNeo-Feudalismdigital economytechnology firms
万方数据
维普
