Course : Cloud capital and the international political economy of Big Tech

Course outline

Ever since the original internet was privatised, and Big Tech began to roll out its various free services, we knew that something substantially new was occurring. What we did not know was: How new?

At first, it seemed that it was just a question of fixed costs rising sky high while marginal costs vanished. Or that the internet was turbocharging the marketing methods first developed by monopoly capital in the 1950s, turning us into an audience to be ‘sold’ much more efficiently to advertisers (but not too differently from how early commercial television sold its audiences, the difference boiling down to far more personalised targeting of advertisements). However, in the last decade or so, it has become clear that something far more radical has evolved.

Shoshana Zuboff, in her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future and the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs), argued that monopoly capitalism has turned into a new variant: surveillance capitalism, as she calls it. But is Big Tech simply boosting the capacity of monopoly capital to extract surpluses from consumers?

In my 2023 book Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism?, I make a more radical claim: Big Tech, subsidised massively by our central banks’ quantitative easing programs, has brought into being a brand new form of capital – a mutation of capital that has never existed before: cloud capital. Unlike traditional (or terrestrial) capital, cloud capital is not a produced means of production but a produced means of behavioural modification. Powered by reinforcement learning algorithms and, today, generative artificial intelligence, cloud capital gives new powers to the capitalists that own it – the cloudalists (as the book refers to them, to draw a distinction with owners of traditional capital). This new power has allowed them radically to undermine, and to replace, capitalism’s two main pillars: markets and profits.

This course examines the claim that cloud capital has given rise to a qualitatively different mode of production and distribution to the one we conventionally understood as capitalism. It also looks closely as the implications of cloud capital’s inexorable rise on markets, payment systems, political power, ideology and geopolitics.

Provisional reading list:

• Yanis Varoufakis (2023). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism?, London: Penguin
• Shoshana Zuboff (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future and the New Frontier of Power, New York: Public Affairs
• McKenzie Wark (2019). Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, London: Verso
• Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin (2022). Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, New York: Beacon Press