By Mirza Iqbal Ashraf
ABSTRACT: Technocapitalism, is a new tech-version of capitalism that generates new forms of corporate organization designed to exploit intangibles such as creativity and new knowledge. The new organizations, are deeply grounded in technological research, as opposed to manufacturing and services production. Living in a world of every day dependence on artificial intelligence, we are heavily reliant on the corporate appropriation of techno-researches rather than the outcome of our intellection cognition. We do not think and question ourselves, whether this is a culture of truthful information, autonomous thought, or of a solitary self-analysis? But technology being a subject of social intervention, affects and is affected by functional and cultural influences. With a powerful smartphone integrated with a camera in our hand, we have started communicating, connecting, and talking with each other through pictures. Whereas the smartphone is creating a culture of physical separateness, the camera is now cultivating a culture of pictorial connectivity and celebrity exposure promoted by the digital art of ‘selfie.’ As a symbol of complacency within surveillance culture and an image with potential for self-empowerment, ‘selfie’ is a social media which has changed the way people contact, communicate, and present themselves to the world. It occupies a space of spontaneity, freedom in taking and sharing one’s own image. While this technology superficially saves us from the fear of anonymity and validates a trendy visibility, it is slowly depriving our brain of its capabilities and sensibilities for direct intellectual investigation. It is damaging interpersonal social skills, emotional bonds, and spiritual virtues of ethics and morality, which the older generation learned through a common and spontaneous face-to-face tactile interaction. This tendency has also changed the way we conduct our daily social and business activities, such as online buying and selling of products selecting from pictorial display, paying online from our bank accounts, and communicating or chatting by texting. Having invented a techno-culture, we have laid the foundation of digitized technocorporatism by replacing the old economics of capitalism with the new scientific system of technocapitalism.
Technocapitalism: For human beings, emancipation is not only freedom from socio-political oppression, but also from the economic conditions deployed over the society through the power of business organizations or corporations. Corporatism as an agency of capitalism—an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit by few—colonizes human emancipation, the basic objective of a just society. Capital accumulation, competitive markets, price monopoly, private property, recognition of ownership rights, voluntary exchange, wage labor, and accumulation of wealth are central characteristics of capitalism. In a capitalist market economy, though prices and distribution of goods are determined by competition and services markets, the owner of wealth is the decision maker of production ability in the financial market. Capitalism right from its origin has been more comfortable with theocracies, autocracies, and monarchies, while its relationship with democracy has always been a tense one, in many cases a total contradiction. This is because, capitalism is ruled by the owner of capital who individually or through a corporation controls the economy and people’s needs, whereas democracy as a rule of the majority has neither capital nor reason to be identified with capitalism. Since capitalism’s corruptive role of hoarding wealth gives free hand to the capitalist to control and deprive common people from their right of access to money for their needs, it creates an economic slavery.
Though the creation of internet technology in modern age has multiple consequences: natural, social, political, and economic, it has given a new form to traditional capitalism as technocapitalism. Just as technology is the result of human creativity, technocapitalism, grounded on the power of corporatism and its exploitation of technological creativity, has now created technocorporatism as its agency. It has developed a new form of economics of technology—a form of economics which is not being implemented by any theory of the economists, but is being autonomously driven by the technology. It does not need to be defined by an expert in the field of economics, is independent, and does not seek the guidance of any hypothesis. Rather, the market out there is expressing itself through technology’s operating system beneath our computer’s interfaces and platforms, unrecognized even by the developers themselves. This technical system is called technocapitalism and its operating system is called technocorporatism, which in the view of human intellectualism, drives the antihuman agenda in our society.
This new version of capitalism, founded in technology and science, is bringing about new forms of corporate power and organizations that will have major implications for human society during the twenty-first century. In new technocorporate regimes, technological creativity, which is primarily oriented toward research and intellectual appropriation, is turned into a commodity and is colonized by technocapitalism. As, day by day, the new phenomenon of technocorporatism becomes ever more intrusive and rapacious through its control over technological creativity and innovation, it is likely to bring about some major social, political, and economic consequences. However, the very purpose of the operating system of the technocapitalist is same as it has been from the ancient times when agrarian societies were structured by religion-sponsored capitalist system depriving common peoples from acquiring money for their betterment, keeping them away from their access to wealth, and preventing widespread prosperity in the society, which is fundamental to human emancipation.
What we now think of Adam Smith’s idea of commercial society, born in the eighteenth century in the midst of a period of organic economic growth and which evolved into capitalism in the Western world, is today falling into an indistinguishable abyss. Adam Smith was well aware of the abstract nature of the corporations and stressed that regulations would be necessary to keep them from destroying the market place. In the same way, today, the “digital based business” of technocapitalism is just software that converts real assets into abstract forms of shareholder value. The myth on which the techno-enthusiasts project their hopes is that new innovations will continue to create new markets and more growth—just as in our history, when agriculture reached at its peak, we got the steam engine; when electricity replaced steam engine and radio television emerged, it created new demand; when the world wide web retail slowed its growth, we got data mining; and when data as a commodity seemed to plateau, we got artificial intelligence, which needs massive supply of data in order to learn and keep going.
Today’s autonomous technologies, online markets, free media, have paralyzed our ability to think as humans, connect to each other meaningfully, and act constructively and purposefully. We are living in the age of digital culture which has given rise to technocapitalism controlled by few IT organizations. As today’s market is expressing itself through autonomous technologies it is producing a bounty for the few technocapitalist, such as four overpowering major technocorporations Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple—abbreviated as GAFA—have grown wealthy giants. Whereas, during the traditional capitalist system, the CEO of a typical company in 1960 made about 20 times as much an average worker, today, a CEO of a technocorporation makes 271 times the salary of the average worker, which is evidently helping accumulation of wealth in few hands and is preventing wide spread of prosperity. Without thinking and questioning, we are relying and trusting Google for information, shopping online with Amazon, socializing on Facebook, and turning to Apple for entertainment.
Our cultural values and market transactions which were once forces for human connections and expressions are now being isolated, rather, are becoming archaic. The digital culture and technological markets are repressing our natural human values. Our society is no more together. We are as individual players who find their souls in smartphones; introduce and recognize ourselves in selfie and facebook; seek information from digital media; visit online for shopping: and interact with friends and relatives through diverse mediums made available to us by the IT. Among many transformations taking place in global economy, none is more salient than the growth of gigantic Internet platforms whose real danger is not that they distort markets, rather they threaten democracy. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Youtube, Twitter, and Texting, were already an accepted way of everyday life that has been moving our daily activities online, became even more popular during the covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, few ultra-wealthy families owning technocorporations, owning 80 percent of the world’s wealth, are worried about the impoverished class staging an uprising—either now or after a disaster—and feel that they must continue to hoard cash and gold, build real estate assets, control supplies, and mind their own security. The bounty produced by the modern technocapitalists is more than offset by its dependence on nonrenewable resources and human slavery. Though it is for them ar ownust continue to bne and radios convenient as the technology in their control, the emergence of few mega dominant technocorporations are also ringing alarm bells—not just because they hold so much economic power but also because they wield so much control over political and social order—that they are posing threats, even to a well-functioning democracy.
We know that digital markets exhibit certain features that distinguish them from conventional ones, for example its coin is data. Once a single technocorporation has amassed data on hundreds of millions of users, it can move into completely new markets and beat hundreds of established firms that lack similar knowledge. Moreover, the technocorporations benefit greatly from so-called network efforts. The larger the network gets, the more useful it becomes to its users, creating a positive feedback loop that leads a single company to dominate the market. Unlike traditional firms, companies in the digital space do not compete for market share; they compete for the market itself, can entrench themselves and make further competition impossible. They can easily devour small companies, and swallow up potential rivals, as Facebook did by purchasing Instagram and WhatsApp, and thus, can colonize human societies, turning our most precious human qualities into commodities.
The concentrated economic and political power of the digital platform is like loaded weapon sitting on a table. No liberal democracy, even based on the assumption about its good intention, is prepared to entrust concentrated political power to individual technocorporation. The problem, however, is that neither the United States, nor the European Union could likely break up Facebook or Google the way traditional corporation like Standard Oil and AT&T were broken up. Perhaps more important, it is not clear that a breaking up of Amazon, Google or Facebook, for example, would solve the underlying problem. There is a very good chance that a baby created by such a breakup would quickly grow to replace the parent. Data probability faces a number of obstacles. Chief among them is the difficulty of moving many kinds of data. Although it is easy enough to transfer some basic data—such as one’s name, address, credit card information, and email address—it would be far harder to transfer all of a user’s metadata.
The ideology of technocapitalism is part of a line of thought that relates science and technology to the evolution of traditional capitalism. At the core of this idea of the evolution of capitalism is that science and technology is not divorced from society nor it exists in a vacuum, or in a separate reality of its own. Though this modern form of technocapitalism is autonomously moving ahead supported by technological creativity, it is not out of reach of social action and human decision. In our time, this line of thought has encouraged philosophers to adopt and apply a theoretical and critical approach to internet technology and science in general, providing many important insights on how scientific and technological decisions and their outcomes are to be shaped by the society, by the capitalists and their institutions. Thus, the term technocapitalism has been used to denote aspects that diverge sharply from the corporate environment and relationships in a high tech-oriented local economy. . . Copyright © 2021 by Mirza Iqbal Ashraf
