Digital Objects, Digital Subjects : Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Capitalism, Labour and Politics in the Age of Big Data

This volume explores activism, research and critique in the age of digital subjects and objects and Big Data capitalism after a digital turn said to have radically transformed our political futures. Optimists assert that the ‘digital’ promises: new forms of community and ways of knowing and sensing, innovation, participatory culture, networked activism, and distributed democracy. Pessimists argue that digital technologies have extended domination via new forms of control, networked authoritarianism and exploitation, dehumanization and the surveillance society. Leading international scholars present varied interdisciplinary assessments of such claims – in theory and via dialogue – and of the digital’s impact on society and the potentials, pitfalls, limits and ideologies, of digital activism. They reflect on whether computational social science, digital humanities and ubiquitous datafication lead to digital positivism that threatens critical research or lead to new horizons in theory and society. Chapter 1 Introduction......Page 6 Section I Digital Capitalism and Big Data Capitalism......Page 26 Chapter 2 Digital Governance in the Anthropocene......Page 28 Chapter 3 Beyond Big Data Capitalism, Towards Dialectical Digital Modernity......Page 48 Chapter 4 Karl Marx in the Age of Big Data Capitalism......Page 58 Chapter 5 What is at Stake in the Critique of Big Data?......Page 78 Chapter 6 Seeing Like a Cyborg? The Innocence of Posthuman Knowledge......Page 86 Chapter 7 Posthumanism as a Spectrum......Page 100 Section II Digital Labour......Page 106 Chapter 8 Through the Reproductive Lens......Page 108 Chapter 9 Contradictions in the Twitter Social Factory......Page 122 Chapter 10 E(a)ffective Precarity, Control and -Resistance in the Digitalised Workplace......Page 130 Chapter 11 Beyond Repression: Reflections on Phoebe Moore’s Chapter......Page 150 Chapter 12 Goodbye iSlave: Making Alternative Subjects Through Digital Objects......Page 156 Chapter 13 Wage-Workers, Not Slaves: Reflections on Jack Qiu’s Chapter......Page 170 Section III Digital Politics......Page 174 Chapter 14 Critique or Collectivity? Communicative Capitalism and the Subject of Politics......Page 176 Chapter 15 Subjects, Contexts and Modes of Critique......Page 188 Chapter 16 The Platform Party : The Transformation of Political Organisation in the Era of Big Data......Page 192 Chapter 17 The Movement Party - Winning Elections and Transforming Democracy in a Digital Era......Page 204 Chapter 18 The Appropriation of Fixed Capital: A Metaphor?......Page 210 Chapter 19 Appropriation of Digital Machines and Appropriation of Fixed Capital......Page 220 The Editors and the Contributors......Page 228 Index......Page 232

This book explores activism, research and critique in the age of digital subjects and objects and Big Data capitalism after a digital turn said to have radically transformed our political futures. Optimists assert that the 'digital' promises: new forms of community and ways of knowing and sensing, innovation, participatory culture, networked activism, and distributed democracy. Pessimists argue that digital technologies have extended domination via new forms of control, networked authoritarianism and exploitation, dehumanization and the surveillance society. Leading international scholars present varied interdisciplinary assessments of such claims—in theory and via dialogue—and of the digital's impact on society, the potentials, pitfalls, limits and ideologies, of digital activism. They reflect on whether computational social science, digital humanities and ubiquitous datafication lead to digital positivism that threatens critical research or lead to new horizons in theory and society.