Apr 08, 2026
3 min read
The relationship between capitalism and the Internet has evolved, and digital technologies have contributed to multiplying capitalist differences and reinforcing racism rather than overcoming them.More dangerously, the limits of capitalist exploitation have expanded.
From Manchester to Barcelona... How do we understand the Internet as an expression of the power of capital?
In this long essay, Ben Darnoff, a professional writer on technology and founder of Logic, tries to explain the development of the relationship between capitalism and the Internet, and how digital technologies have contributed to the increase of capitalist inequality and the strengthening of racism.Even more dangerous is the expansion of the boundaries of capitalist exploitation. Once trapped in a factory, all members of society become like factory workers who contribute to financial accumulation without sharing in the wealth earned by the owners of the company.In the face of these atrocities, Darnoff offers practical and ambitious solutions to defeat the policies of tech companies that follow us everywhere and eventually turn us into digital data and bank balances.
A number of axioms have long dominated our digital imagination, and I'm sure they are familiar to many of you: Information should be accessible to everyone, anything that enables communication between people is necessarily a good thing, government control of the Internet is bad, the Internet is another world where the old rules do not apply, the Internet is a place where individual freedom manifests itself, and this freedom is essentially freedom of expression.
These ideas have never been the subject of absolute consensus, but have always been the subject of debate to one degree or another.Governments have found many ways to assert their sovereignty over the Internet.Scientists realized early on during the rise of white supremacist websites - the Neo-Nazi website Stormfront started in 1996 - that we should be careful that the communication provided by the Internet can also make the world a worse place.
However, these theories have gained control over common sense, and the traditions from which these assumptions emerged — techno-utopianism, cyberlibertarianism, and Californian ideology — are dominant.The long decade of the 1990s began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ended with the September 11, 2001 attacks.But in terms of our open discussions on the Internet, the decade of the 1990s lasted much longer!
Then came Edward Snowden.In 2013, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the Internet ran a massive spying machine to serve US security interests.This led to technological pessimism seeping into the public consciousness.Trump finally arrived.Due to the failure of the media to predict the probability of victory in the 2016 election, these media exaggerated the role of Russian influence operations in the voter mood through social media (their existence is beyond doubt, but the amplification of these operations created extreme confusion and the Surprise happened immediately, depicted as if it were a strange consequence of these operations that could explain a super-magical operation that could explain these elections).in the midst of all this, there was an unexpected positive side to this kind of attunement to what was happening; for it provided the spark that started what became known as the "clash with technology" (4) (techlash).
Thus, journalists and politicians began to pay more attention to the Internet and the companies that control it.The issue of media misinformation remained a major concern, but the results multiplied and many problems seemed to be addressed.He led the critics of Silicon Valley.
The result of this transformation was crude!This sharp new tone began to appear both in the pages of the New York Times and on Fox News, and among state governors and Congress without distinction [i.e., between right and left and between Republicans and Democrats alike].After criticism was limited to narrow scientific circles, barely known except on the pages of some opposition websites and magazines such as "The Baffler" and "Valleywag", these criticisms have become commonplace on all platforms and languages until they become clichéd and repetitive.One can get angry at the voices of this chorus of annoying opportunists who have become critics of technology overnight, but despite this, the wave of confrontations with technology is ultimately good, because we can finally have a real debate about the Internet.The long 90s are over and the old gods are dead!
Where is the new god?That makes the moment we live in interesting. The oldest categories have collapsed, but the alternative has yet to be established. James Bridle: Something is wrong with the Internet and the way we think about the Internet.But we still don't have correct and acceptable answers: Where's wrong?How can we fix that?
Two groups are now competing to provide these answers. They are competing to tell a new story about the Internet, a story that can explain the root of our problem and give us a way to overcome it.Some talk about privacy and the need to attack it, while others focus on privacy issues and the need for user consent.profits, created by the Internet and related technologies.
Admittedly, there are significant differences between these analyses, but they share a liberal understanding of capitalism as an essentially beneficial system, even if state intervention is occasionally necessary to curb its excesses.These analyzes then engage in the trade-off between capitalism and markets.Although the antitrust team believes that these markets can merge and collide, and then the dose of competition should be increased in them, supporters of Zuboff's vision believe that market players sometimes violate the terms of fair exchange and then they should be limited.But both groups - as I mentioned earlier - are united in two compelling convictions: The first is that capitalism as a whole is compatible with people's desire for dignity and the right to determine their own decisions (or it can be made with some appropriate modifications).Second, capitalism and markets.What if both beliefs are wrong?This is the starting point from which we can build a better story on the Internet!
If capitalism is not just a market, what is it?
Markets have existed since ancient times, but capitalism is still new. Capitalist principles first appeared in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but did not reach their full strength until the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But capitalism has made the market more important than ever.Historian Robert Brenner points out that capitalism is essentially what markets depend on.Before capitalism, farmers traded and bartered, but did not depend on markets for their livelihood. Instead, they grew their own food.In a capitalist society, you live your daily life only through the market.You have no choice but to buy what you need to survive;to find the money to buy, you have to sell your labor power for wages.
"Relying on the market" does an important job: it helps to accumulate.Accumulation is the goal of any capitalist organization.To extract more value from the total value you have.What makes capitalism change and change is not markets, but accumulation.Let's explain this matter in Marx's way: Capital is value in motion. Every time money moves, it increases and increases.Therefore, capitalism is a way of organizing human societies with the aim of making money.
There are several ways to move capital.The capitalist's main method is to buy people's labor power, use it to produce new value in the form of goods, and then extract the value by selling it and making a profit.After that, part of the profits are reinvested to expand the production process, so that the owner of the money can produce more goods at lower production costs, so that he can compete more efficiently with other producers who produce the same goods.
Everything I've said may seem very obvious, but capitalism is actually a special way of doing this system.If we think about other types of social organization, we see that the goal of production is often to meet people's needs. The average farmer grew what he and his family would eat.Sometimes the goal of production is to make the ruler rich. Slaves in ancient Rome often did the dirty work so that the men of the royal court could enjoy the colors of luxury and pleasure.
What makes capitalism an unusual phenomenon is that production (and accumulation) does not aim at anything in particular, it seeks only to enable more production and more accumulation.This obsession gives capitalism its great mobility and power, and its revolutionary power.There is no doubt that capitalism has completely changed human life and changed – and this affects us – the way we produce.Capitalism has forced people to produce together, in increasingly complex work and occupational groups and formations.Production is no longer something that the worker does alone; it has become a social issue.
This type of energy is seen in factories.Modernism was first born in nineteenth-century Manchester, where Friedrich Engels' father was a cotton mill owner.This allowed the young Engels to closely follow the birth of the new factory.He saw hundreds of workers, yes, huddled in thousands of buildings, always lined up around the machines, each playing a different role in a complex and unified division of labor that served a single goal.They do something together.
In pre-capitalist Europe, individuals or groups of people could produce goods or commodities in the fullest sense of the word. But the situation is different in capitalist factories, since "the yarn, cloth, and metal products that come out of the factory are the collective labor of a large number of workers, each of whom plays a small role in organizing the goods."
But therein lies the paradox of capitalism.No worker has the right to claim credit for production, but the factory owner claims to himself only whatever the workers produce in their collective labor.Wealth is now created through social participation, under the new model, but under the old model it still belongs to the person individually.
This contradiction will appear even sharper if we look at the bigger picture and take into account the economy as a whole.No matter how many workers were required to operate the cotton mill in Manchester, the number needed to operate the factory must have been much greater: machine builders, those responsible for powering the machines, slaves who picked cotton in South America to feed the machines, etc.The collective work that exists inside the workshop occurs because it is the focus of several cycles of collaborative work outside the workshop.
In contrast, the pre-capitalist economy looked more like an archipelago of islands, as it included groups of small producers, each operating in isolation from the others and producing what they produced for personal use.(Remember that earlier Marx compared French farmers to sacks of potatoes!) In contrast, the capitalist economy looked more like a network. The network of capital concentrates the masses of people in the main nodes of production and connects them with countless threads of interdependence.But the wealth produced by this network is not distributed among the many workers who all contributed to its production, but rather among the few who own the network: they are the owners of capital.
Before capitalism, when work was done on a small scale and limited to a person or group of people, organizing responsibilities in this way was appropriate.If an economy is a group of islands, then it makes sense that each island has something to do.But capitalism, with the changes in the field of work it has brought about, has created a major contradiction in this regard: wealth is created based on the network model, but wealth remains stable based on the land model.The capitalists were as rich as Engels' father, while the workers in Manchester continued to receive wages that were insufficient to meet their basic needs in a poor, cholera-stricken area!
What does this have to do with the internet?
The Internet, and the set of digital technological developments that we call "technology" in general, multiply that deep contradiction of capitalism between the fact that wealth is produced through collective action and then owned by individuals.The technology multiplies exponentially the effect of the Manchester Model, because it increases the collective process of wealth production in an unprecedented way, and the accumulation of new wealth thereby, but in the end the wealth remains in the hands of a few owners, as was the case in Engels' time.
I've said that the Manchester cotton mill can't hold on by a thread and say, "I did it," that little bubble was made by a few thousand workers (and slaves).And technological wealth, on the other hand, is the result of the contribution of billions of people, living and dead!
For this reason, the technology field has a very high profit margin.Take Facebook for example.In 2018, Facebook reported net income of $22 billion, with an operating margin of 45%.The company has 40,000 full-time employees, with an undisclosed number of external contractors, meaning that the cost of production compared to the profit it receives is almost nothing.
Then Facebook's power doesn't just come from money.These mainstream media ecosystems have come to embody what Frank Pascual calls "functional sovereignty."They act like governments (the most famous example is the case of Libra, Facebook's global digital currency) and this government is a totalitarian state in which Mark Zuckerberg holds a stake to ensure that he manages and controls the company.
It's hard to imagine a more paradoxical Manchester model than a millionaire ruling a social network of more than two billion people.The chain of capital is in the hands of a few in a more centralized way than Engels imagined.
To say that Facebook has only a small number of workers relative to what it does does not mean that the work done by these workers is unimportant.The content managers, data center technicians, site engineers and other workers are the ones who run the business and prevent it from collapsing.But their collective work ultimately depends - as it did with the workers at the factory of Engels' father - on many rounds of collective action outside Facebook, and the value of their participation is External sources, in the case of Facebook or other tech companies, are many and far-reaching.
Among these sources are the workers who develop the software and equipment, implement the protocols, and create the programming languages that form the basis of the technology industry.These ancillary industries have evolved over the decades since the invention of the first modern electronic computer in the 1940s, and depend primarily—perhaps even exclusively—on funding from the US military.Another source is the workers who do the first factory jobs from which all the profits come.Many of these jobs are menial or dangerous, and include manufacturing smartphones., searching for rare earths and classifying training data for machine learning models.
Although these careers are diverse,Whether the job is inventing internet protocols or laying fiber optic cables.These occupations are still considered traditional occupations because their owners work for a known wage.But technology can create value from activities that are unlike traditional work. If we return to Facebook, we see that the value the company derives from the roughly two billion users who contribute posts, comments, and likes to the site.This content then provides personal information to Facebook that is used to sell targeted ads.along with all user activity on the platformThis means that we, the users, represent the largest contributors to profits.
It is impossible to confirm theoretically whether "posting" and "suppressing" on Facebook are really "work" and, if so, what kind of work it is. In her seminal article on the subject, theorist Tiziana Terranova used the term "freelance" to describe the variety of unpaid activities that supported and promoted profitability in the early days of the commercial Internet, from volunteer work as a coordinator for AOL (known as America Online) to designers whoopen source software. But since Terranova published her paper in 2000, the scope of these activities has expanded dramatically and they become less like "work" as we commonly understand the word. As time goes on, technology is becoming more and more capable of providing us with value by simply being in the world and using it!
A good example can be taken from a cafe called Brainwash in San Francisco.Until it closed, this cafe had cameras that kept taking pictures of customers.After the cafe closed, several researchers took this footage and used the data to develop machine learning models for head and face recognition programs.In 2016, the Chinese company Megvii, a leader in facial recognition software, used this data to develop its own software.[with a Uighur Muslim majority] in the west of the country.So imagine that by walking into a coffee shop in San Francisco, you could help a tech company make more profits by selling the Chinese government products that help it oppress millions of citizens 6,000 miles away.(Migvi is now valued at $4 billion and hopes to increase its value by an additional billion when it offers its bonds on the stock market.)
Such a strange and complex value chain will become more common in the coming years. As computer networks enter our homes, stores, streets and workplaces, they will generate more information.At the same time, computers are developing at an ever-increasing rate of learning and their ability to process data found online to benefit systems ranging from facial recognition to predicting consumer preferences during shopping.
The result is a world in which the production of wealth is more collective than ever beforeIn the 19th century, Engels discussed how capitalism changed the mode of production "from an individual to a social activity".New Manchester has become ubiquitous
Capitalism connects us to each other and, in the relentless drive towards accumulation, brings people to new places and circles to produce wealth together.But capitalism is not only a machine to build communication, but also a machine to produce division. Capitalism produces inequality and difference in the same process, which produces wealth.
Let's go back to the case of Manchester, and look at the mechanism that made the difference.The people who accumulate the wealth of this city are not homosexuals. On the contrary, they are divided into men and women, English and Irish, white and black.These differences are constantly reinforced because they serve an important purpose: they help legitimize exploitation and are now problematic.
It was therefore normal that the Irish earned lower wages than the English and lived in poorer settlements.It was also normal for the women to receive lower wages than the men, while they also had to take care of children without pay (these children go to work in factories at the age of five!) Similarly, it was natural and legal to enslave people of African descent and bring them to harvest the cotton that the factories supplied along with the cotton after they removed their occupants.It was natural to rob the land of the tribes living in the planted fields!
Capitalism did not invent human differences. People are different in appearance, language, society and culture, but capitalism has made these differences have a great impact on human life.This made the differences into differences, and the differences began to affect the abilities and values of individuals.(and even determine whether he is considered a person at all or not!).
Political scientist Cedric J.Robinson argues that a characteristic of capitalism from the beginning was the production of difference (hence his nickname "racial capitalism").According to Robinson, feudal Europe was racist.So, as Europeans invaded and colonized each other, for example, they came up with racist ideas to justify the enslavement of Slavic peoples.(In fact, the word "slave" came into English and other European languages because of the widespread slavery of slaves in the Middle Ages.)
If racist thinking pervades the society in which capitalism arose, then it was the role of capitalism to capture and expand these concepts to the maximum.Capitalism developed and deepened ideas about racial difference in order to justify the new relations of exploitation and subjugation required by the accumulation of production (especially after Europeans began to invade Asia, Africa and the Americas).Robinson says: "The tendency of European civilization with capitalism was not to increase homogeneity, but rather in the direction of intensifying differences and even in the direction of transforming regional, cultural and dialectical differences into racial, racial differences."
Robinson's ideas help us clarify another important aspect of how technology works.We said that technology increases capitalism's conflict between the accumulation of wealth and individual ownership, and now we say that it increases the tendency of capitalism to divide people into groups, each group with its own goods and resources.These two pieces of technology are intertwined.Theorist Jodi Melamed said that "capital is not a thing except through accumulation", and continues to say: "Capital can only accumulate through production and movement through relations of grave inequality between groups of people."In other words: the creation of a wealth network depends on the machine to produce this difference.
Over time, distinctions have been created automatically through software and at the algorithmic level as digital masses of data flow into machine learning algorithms, the latter finding patterns in the data, giving capitalism a powerful tool for categorizing people and separating each group separately.
Back in 1993, the media expert Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. Anticipated what would happen and gave us a clear view of this working mechanism, which he called "The Panoptic Sort", in his book of the same name.He said: "The bird's eye classification is a machine that can classify individuals into categories and classes based on a standard measurement system," he said. "It is the technology that makes the difference that identifies options and opportunities based on metrics and management models that support them."
Gandhi observed how governments and companies collected and processed personal data, at a time when computers were still primitive compared to today (and there certainly wasn't yet an online store).However, Gandhi recognized the logic established today: data comes from many sources with the aim of creating people "on the basis of assumed political and economic value".This process, according to Gandhi, is not something secondary or marginal to capitalism, but an integral part of it, like division with vision it is comprehensive "all-encompassing around the machine that makes the differences that drive the global capitalist system".
Today, the all-seeing eye can see more than before, and the risks of classification are greater than before.The classifications made by algorithms help determine who deserves a loan from the bank and who doesn't, who deserves a job and who deserves jail time.Furthermore, Gandy noted that classification and comprehensive lifestyles reinforce existing inequalities, whether racial or otherwise.Today, with the development of self-learning systems, this is truer than it was yesterday.
In recent years, various scholars and journalists have tried to draw attention to the problem of "algorithmic bias".This bias is endemic and resides in self-learning systems because they simply "learn" through data from the real social world (data that necessarily reflects centuries of differences and inequalities created by capitalism).Subsequently, the "predictive" algorithms of the "police" are learning from data that shows them that the police have arrested many black people, which leads them to expect to arrest more black people.This is also the case with Amazon's algorithms trained on the resumes of mostly male employees, which favor men over women in job opportunities.
The role of these systems is not only to create inequality, but also to normalize it.Capitalism, with its machine of difference, always needs honest ideological work to maintain those differences.For hundreds of years, philosophers, monks, scientists, and statesmen have been forced to believe that one type of human being is inferior to others, and that it is legal and appropriate to rob these people of their land and suppress their freedom, and to rule over their bodies and exploit their nature is a part of existence. These ideas do not arise or spread by themselves.Rather, they must be actors who deliberately spread them across space, time, generation, and continent. These ideas must be established in laws and practices, taught in schools and churches, and implemented in homes and streets.
All of this takes time and effort, but self-learning automated systems can speed things up. They reinforce assumptions and show the differences created by capitalism versus the differences created by nature, thanks to the neutrality of computers.If a computer said that black men are more likely to commit crimes or that women are not good software engineers, it would be true.This is what one right-wing commentator said in another form: Algorithms are just math, and math can't be racist!Therefore, education systems themselves not only automate the production of differences and inequalities, they also automate racism.
Every moving body has an ideal medium for movement. A fish needs water to move, a car needs an asphalt road.Since capital is a variable value, it must remain in a state of constant movement.Capital prefers to move within a certain type of social system;A fabric that is connected and separate, connected and continuous, tangled and torn at the same time.
This helps us understand what we call "technology".Technology is the tool and accelerator of this "intimate communication" power, to borrow Melamed's phrase.This explains what it means to get more imbalances in wealth and power, and strengthen the organization of humanitarian organizations based on race, gender and other classifications.
For our analysis to be useful, it must not be limited to the descriptive aspect, but must include an imperative element.That is, one must give some kind of answer to this question: What should be done?
As usual, at this point things get a little more obscure.But one point remains quite clear.If technology exacerbates the existing contradiction of wealth being accumulated by the many and then owned by the few, then the obvious solution must be to resolve this contradiction: wealth must be collectively produced and collectively owned, or, as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, the solution is to turn the "collective production" of all members of society into the "collective production" of capital.
The logic is simple and attractive: if social networks create wealth, why don't social networks own that wealth? But the big question is.How should this be done? What does it mean to turn the wealth generated by the community into community property?Did you know that this is the question that has spilled the most ink in the history of radical left debate?The socialist solution attempted in the 20th century is a comprehensive national solution based on the Soviet model? But solving this problem did not take long.
Another increasingly popular approach is the tradition of worker self-management.There are many versions of this tradition, perhaps the most significant and heroic of it is the experience that happened in the revolutionary region of Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, when people seized factories, farms and even flower shops and were able to manage everything themselves for a short while.Later, the young Marxist Louis Orr recalled the great joy he felt as he walked through the anarchist streets of Barcelona, and how the cafes, restaurants, hotels and theaters lit red or red-black lamps and hung banners on their doors saying "It has been confiscated" or "It has become common to all".
The Barcelona model and its consequences are one of the possible alternatives to the Manchester model.But what does it mean to make decisions about autonomy in the field of technology?Here are some experiments that provide the first steps to creating solutions.There are small connected platforms for everything from ride-hailing companies to companies that manage social media. There are also internet networks that cover the borders of direct management and are managed by the local community. There are also some ambitious proposals - although their potential is not clear in the short term - to democratize large platforms, either by turning them into cooperatives of some kind or by giving them data to users.
These projects and proposals may become tangible reality. As practical concepts they seem to have great value, but they are necessarily limited and incomplete, especially when they are considered as possible guides to capitalism.Under capitalism, cooperatives always behave like ordinary companies, because they are all governed by the same market.Therefore, there is no straight line connecting the current experience of self-management with the broader goal of breaking with the logic of endless accumulation and rebuilding society on very different foundations.
There is no direct connection between democratizing property and countering the various forms of oppression inherent in capitalist ways of producing difference. Platforms owned by partners will not eliminate algorithmic racism, for example.This brings up another important point: sometimes the most liberal option is not to transfer ownership of a deep infrastructure and change the way it is managed, but to remove it altogether.
Take the example of Stop LAPD Spying, a coalition that has organized for years against police surveillance in Los Angeles.This coalition succeeded in forcing the police department to abandon two preemptive policing programs (programs that lead to increased police violence against working-class communities of color).The organizers of this union did not settle for reforming the programs. Instead, they insisted on stopping them completely. They did not ask for the democracy of having a digital police, but rather insisted on the complete elimination.
Therefore, in this example, an organization opposed the tendency of technology to increase the production of capitalist differences, and tried to eliminate the use of technology.Such a method is also found in the growing movement against facial recognition programs, where some cities have banned even public institutions from using the program.These campaigns and similar ones are based on the belief that some technologies are too dangerous and should not be allowed in the first place.complete" and destroy the tool that enables this group.
We can call this choice the Luddite choice (6), and there is no doubt that this choice will be the key to freedom in the future.Historian David F. Noble once wrote about the need to think about technology in terms of the present [not the future].represent their lives.These people are not fooled by the myth of science that tried to convince them to wait for a better future that technology will bring;Instead, they have seen what technology has done to them today, and they have taken steps to stop it.These people are not enemies of technology, but they are against social control by some technology output.This technology must be removed to eliminate these relationships and try to create new, alternative relationships that will be created from the ground up and not the other way around.
Sometimes smashing cars is a good idea;But there are other ideas and other movements.Tech workers led collective action against contracts with the US Department of Defense (Pentagon) and against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, demanding an end to policies of discrimination and favoritism based on gender.Freelancers are joining forces with platforms like Uber to demand better wages, benefits and working conditions.In these movements, we can find useful material for reflection, material which can reveal the features of a new society, whose organization rests on other foundations.
Wisdom is not the only thinker. The moving human mass also thinks. The process is chaotic, winding, It is full of blind alleys and deceptive entrances. A lot of time is spent moving to new places without finally resolving contradictions, but in the future the movement of capital can be stopped and a new consideration - human needs; It is the only way to allow the collective to live together. The left will answer the question of what to do about technology: by thinking together. Thinking back and forth, By going through the fieldturbulent!
- The opinion that technical progress will lead us to an ideal state.
- The belief that the spread of the Internet will reduce state restrictions on individual freedom.
- This is the title of an article written by left-wing technology theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, in which they say that the rise of technology companies in Silicon Valley in the 1990s will lead to the rise of neoliberalism, which will give people greater freedom in opposing the state, and that the end result of this technological activity will be a creative meeting between left and right ideas.All the traditions mentioned by the author became popular in the 1990s.
The phenomenon of technological conflicts refers to the growing hostility towards technology companies and doubts about the consequences of technological developments (5G, Big Data, etc.).
It is a Marxist movement that arose from the labor position in the 1960s and presented the theoretical and practical development of classical Marxism. Among its most prominent theorists is Antonio Negri (translator).
- When the introduction of machinery into woolen mills threatened the jobs of many manual workers, many labor groups formed secret vows to destroy the new industrial mechanization. They were known as Luddites, named after Ned Ludd, who had previously killed two seed mills.
This article was translated by Logic and does not necessarily represent the Medan website.
