Economics and politics of radical technologies

Each subsequent technological revolution promises to solve humanity’s problems – to triumph over poverty, exclusion, and the power of oligarchy. But each time we watch as technological utopias fade away when confronted with real capitalism which is excellent at instrumentalising technology to squeeze out of it even more value added and control labour force even more effectively.

The analysis of supervision and extraction presents a completely different history of contemporary information economy, demonstrating how the promise of freedom and welfare made by techno-optimists is broken. The analysis of data on inequalities, precarisation of work and predatory business models reveals how cognitive capitalism works – a new regime of capital accumulation, based on the invigilation of digital Taylorism and extraction of value in networks of factories.  However, such a model of economy is not deterministically unavoidable. We want to point out emerging movements and concepts that oppose capitalism in the areas of ethics, platform-based cooperativism, public data or democratic planning for value creation for everyone.