On the contrary. The history of Silicon Valley is absolutely dependent on state intervention -- especially via the industrial-military complex and the aero-spatial complex. The Ames Research Center, one of NASA's top labs, is in Mountain View. Stanford was always awarded juicy military research contracts. During WWII, Hewlett Packard, for instance, was flourishing thanks to their electronics being used to manufacture radars. Throughout the 1960s, the US military bought the bulk of the still infant semiconductor production.
The Rise of Data Capital, a 2016 MIT Technological Review report produced "in partnership" with Oracle, showed how digital networks open access to a new, virgin underground brimming with resources: "Those that arrive first and take control obtain the resources they're seeking" -- in the form of data.
So everything from video-surveillance images and electronic banking to DNA samples and supermarket tickets implies some form of territorial appropriation. Here we see in all its glory the extra-activist logic inbuilt in the development of Big Data.
Durand gives us the example of Android to illustrate the extra-activist logic in action. Google made Android free for all smartphones so it would acquire a strategic market position, beating the Apple ecosystem and thus becoming the default internet entry point for virtually the whole planet. That's how a de facto, immensely valuable, online real estate empire is built.
The key point is that whatever the original business -- Google, Amazon, Uber -- strategies of conquering cyberspace all point to the same target: take control of "spaces of observation and capture" of data.
About the Chinese credit system...
Durand offers a finely balanced analysis of the Chinese credit system -- a public/private hybrid system launched in 2013 during the 3rd plenum of the 18th Congress of the CCP, under the motto "to value sincerity and punish insincerity."
For the State Council, the supreme government authority in China, what really mattered was to encourage behavior deemed responsible in the financial, economic and socio-political spheres, and sanction what is not. It's all about trust. Beijing defines it as "a method of perfecting the socialist market economy system that improves social governance."
The Chinese term -- shehui xinyong -- is totally lost in translation in the West. Way more complex than "social credit," it's more about "trustworthiness," in the sense of integrity. Instead of the pedestrian Western accusations of being an Orwellian system, priorities include the fight against fraud and corruption at the national, regional and local levels, violations of environmental rules, disrespect of food security norms.
Cybernetic management of social life is being seriously discussed in China since the 1980s. In fact, since the 1940s, as we see in Mao's Little Red Book. It could be seen as inspired by the Maoist principle of "mass lines," as in "start with the masses to come back to the masses: to amass the ideas of the masses (which are dispersed, non-systematic), concentrate them (in general ideas and systematic), then come back to the masses to diffuse and explain them, make sure the masses assimilate them and translate them into action, and verify in the action of the masses the pertinence of these ideas."
Durand's analysis goes one step beyond Soshana Zuboff's
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism when he finally reaches the core of his thesis, showing how digital platforms become "fiefdoms": they live out of, and profit from, their vast "digital territory" peopled with data even as they lock in power over their services, which are deemed indispensable.
And just as in feudalism, fiefdoms dominate territory by attaching serfs. Masters made their living profiting from the social power derived from the exploitation of their domain, and that implied unlimited power over the serfs.
It all spells out total concentration. Silicon Valley stalwart Peter Thiel has always stressed the target of the digital entrepreneur is exactly to bypass competition. As quoted in Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Thiel declared, "Capitalism and competition are antagonistic. Competition is for losers."
So now we are facing not a mere clash between Silicon Valley capitalism and finance capital, but actually a new mode of production:
...a turbo-capitalist survival as rentier capitalism, where Silicon giants take the place of estates, and also the State. That is the "techno-feudal" option, as defined by Durand.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
1
1
