Big Tech in Capital’s Time of Troubles: Theoretical Notes

By Nick Dyer-Witheford

Introduction: Outside the Room

On July 29 2020, in a sweltering Washington heatwave, a roomful of US congresspeople, most, but not all, masked against the rampant coronavirus, interrogated the virtually-present CEOs of four of the most highly market-valued companies on the planet: Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet/Google and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Only Microsoft (whose founder Bill Gates had undergone a similar grilling more than a decade before) was absent from the full conclave of “Big Tech”, a cluster of giant digital corporations at the very apex of the US, and world, economy.[1]

The hearing of the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee was fractious. Republican representatives accused the corporate leaders of censoring conservative opinion on social media. Democrats demanded answers about anti-competitive, market-distorting, innovation-stifling monopolistic practices. Democrats and Republicans criticized each other’s political priorities and masking habits. The CEOs spoke expansively of consumers’ love for their companies’ products and services. No conclusions were reached. Thousands of pages of corporate documentation had been submitted to the subcommittee, but their analysis, publication, and any subsequent policy recommendations, were not expected until after the momentous November 3rd US presidential election.[2] Yet amongst journalists who covered the hearing, there was a repeated refrain, namely, that the querulous encounter raised an important and awkward question; in a room divided between billionaire corporate leaders and elected political representatives,  who, in fact, was the ruler, who the ruled?

The question was mis-framed. The critical division of power ran not so much along the Congressional subcommittee rooms’ theatrical demarcation between political and corporate elites, but rather between those inside the room and those on the outside. In a context of a raging pandemic, deepening recession and violent civil unrest, issues over digitized capital extended well beyond those discussed in the air-conditioned hearings. Thousands of precarious gig-workers, many employed by Facebook and Google, others working for more minor platform companies such as Uber, worried as their jobs evaporated in economic crisis, or continued under virally hazardous condition. Infection-anxious people pondered downloading to their smart phones contact-tracing apps that added to the inscrutable daily surveillance their devices already subjected them to—or, alternatively, regretted their inability to afford a high-end phone capable of hosting such a program. And in the protests ongoing since the killing of George Floyd, demonstrators mobilized via Twitter and WhatsApp ventured into the streets to confront not only tear gas and rubber bullets, but also the digital panoply of drone-equipped, big-data driven militarized policing. These are the issues of high-tech rulership and rebellion discussed on this site. Here we make some initial theoretical propositions.

Circulatory Powers

Analyzing the political valency of Big Tech involves issues of algorithmic influence, ubiquitous surveillance, artificial intelligence, computational propaganda and cyberwarfare, not to mention the contemporary details of corporate lobbying, government contracting and financial markets. However, our theorization of these issues starts with the apparently ancient voice of Marx. In one of his early works, The German ideology (1845), Marx remarks on how capital creates what he—quaintly to modern ears—refers to as “universal intercourse”—or, in the original German, verkehr.[3] Verkehr is a complex term with compound connotations of traffic, transportation, exchange, communications and commercial dealing (Bost 2015). For Marx, it identifies the combination of communication and transportation, media and mobility, integral to the transactions of money, labour and resources required and enabled by capitalism’s world-market.

As is not unusual in the treatment of capital by the young Marx, his discussion of “universal intercourse” is at once celebratory and critical. Verkehr is presented as force that breaks down parochialisms and localisms, emancipates humanity from feudal constraints and opens the way to fuller realization of its “species-being”. But the enthusiasm abruptly stops. Verkher’s emancipatory course, Marx cryptically declares, continues up to a point. Then it becomes “intolerable.” What converts universal intercourse from liberatory force to oppressive imposition is not immediately spelled out. But the overall argument of The German ideology, and of Marx’s work as a whole, leaves little doubt as to the cause. What makes verkehr an “intolerable power” is its distortion by the limits of the very order that unleashed it-- the collision between commodification and universality, profit and freedom. Today, universal intercourse’s fusion of media and mobility incarnates in “mobile media”; the contemporary instantiation of verkehr is the smart phone, the to-hand moonshot-calculation-capable computer, operating systems courtesy of Google or Apple, portal to Facebook, Amazon and the rest of platform capitalism. And today, as we saw, even members of capital’s political establishment feel, or at least feel compelled to pretend they feel, that the oligopolistic private ownership of today’s universal networks has to some degree become “intolerable”.

What the young Marx discusses as “universal intercourse” is in his later works, such as Grundrisse and Capital, developed in more abstract terms through the concept of “circulation”. This is a term that has a double meaning, in a way that is both confusing and felicitous (Kjøsen 2019). The first of these meanings—call it “circulation 1”—designates a specific moment or segment of the process by which capital incessantly transforms from money to commodities to more money, and more commodities. It is, Marx says, only in the process of production, where human labour transforms raw materials into commodities, that “surplus value” is created. However, for this surplus value to be realized as profit, commodities must exit production and go to market, where they can be exchanged for money. “Circulation 1” refers to this phase in the overall circuit of capital. As surplus value is only generated in production, circulation1 cannot add to the value of a commodity. But it can increase the speed and efficiency with which commodities are exchanged for money, realizing their value. Increasing the velocity of circulation decreases the time in which a given quantity of capital “turns over” from commodities to money and back again, thereby increasing its profitability. In this sense, then, circulation1 defines a crucial, but delimited part of the cycle of capital, one which gives rise to its own vast, historically evolving apparatus of transportation, warehousing, logistics, shops, marketing, advertising, financing and all the communicative flows these entail (see Kjøsen 2019).

There is, however, a second meaning of “circulation” in some passages of Marx’s work. In this usage, the term “circulation 2” refers to movement through the entire circuit of capital. It encompasses all the transformations of value through money, the purchase of labour and machinery for production, the making and marketing of commodities, back to more money. “Circulation 2” therefore includes and subsumes production and circulation1—from which, in recent Marxist scholarship, monetary operations of credit, debt and speculation are sometimes split off as a distinct third category of “financialization”. “Circulation 2” thus comprises all of capital’s continuous motion between production, circulation1 and financialization.

The concept of “circulation” therefore in Marx’s work performs a theoretical tromp l’oeil, or, perhaps better, a conceptual synecdoche, making a part of capital’s circuit signify the whole, or, conversely, the whole designate one of its parts (for a passage which deploys both meanings side-by-side, see Marx, 1977, 709-710). This is certainly confusing, but perhaps also illuminating. For, we suggest, it points to a historical process by which capital as a whole becomes increasingly circulatory. Production, marketing and financialization become increasingly tightly integrated; ever larger ratios of waged labour are devoted to logistical, marketing and financial (i.e. “circulation1”) rather than production activities; the “annihilation of space by time” (Marx 1973, 539), the mission of the circulation1, is intensified by production operations at the scale of the world market  and the whole ensemble is increasingly governed by the logics of velocity.

The oscillating semantics of circulation this point to the accelerationist tendencies of capital. Acceleration, in both its left and right variants, is often thought as a rocket-like ascension of technological powers, blasting towards some fatal or utopian destination. That ascending, dynamic is, however, propelled by, and in turn propels, the rotational velocity of capital’s globalized circulation. The technological medium, both product and cause, of this circulatory intensification is provided through the successive revolutionizing of industrial processes by capital, of which the latest is the so-called third or fourth industrial revolution of mobile communication, high speed 5G networks, artificial intelligences, and advanced automation (see Manzerolle and Kjøsen 2012 and 2014; Kjøsen 2016). This is the process for which Big Tech (and, increasingly, its Chinese capitalist competitors) are capitalism’s vanguard, and circulation is the concept that we will use as to connect the ascendancy of platform capitalism with the rise of populist electoral parties, a global pandemic, and worldwide riot.

The thread of circulation links platforms, populisms, pandemics and riots. But it is important to discuss some additions to, and revisions of Marx’s concept of circulation. One comes from Michel Foucault, a theorist far better read with, rather than against, Marx. The concept of Foucault’s (1993) most widely applied to the study of networked accumulation is that of “panoptic” monitoring, and, particularly as it is modulated by Giles Deleuze’s (1995) cybernetic revision in his “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, remains crucial to all understandings of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019). However, as Tiziana Terranova has argued in a series of important studies (2004; 2009; 2015), panopticism is enriched and surpassed in Foucault’s later works on the topic of “biopower”. “Biopower” of course designates the “technologies of power” developed by sovereign states in the era of emergent capitalism to enable rule at the level of entire of populations (Foucault 2009; 2010). And as Terranova (2015) makes clear, the central aim of such population-level modern governance is to secure the conditions of “circulation”, the movement of bodies, merchandise, information, increasingly necessary to a new political economy of accumulation.

This “biopolitical” account of circulation is similar to Marx’s discussion of “universal intercourse”, and Terranova mentions its consonance with Marx’s later writings on capital’s increasing subsumption of social processes. Yet her portrayal of Foucault’s theory of circulation emphasizes elements missing in Marx’s account. It highlights the role of “governmentality”—largely, the activities of the state, however much Foucault eschews that term--alongside and supporting the operations of capital in the fostering and securing of circulation. Foucault’s concept of biopower is, however, more ample than Marx’s focus on labour-power. His treatment of circulation is correspondingly both larger and smaller than Marx’s. On the one hand, he highlights the importance of circulation issues to population-level controls (such as those of pandemic regulation); on the other, through attention to processes of subjectification, Foucault insists on the micro-political affective and attentional dimensions of circulatory control and expansion.

Terranova develops this concept of circulation via Foucault’s discussion of the passage from liberalism to neoliberalism, with the latter dissolving the former’s formal demarcations between the spheres of civil society and capitalist economic calculation. Crucially, for our purposes, Terranova brings her interpretation of Foucault’s work directly into the digital era, and the domain of Big Tech, with a detailed analysis of Facebook’s social graph and its metricisation of relations and affect (“likes”) as an instance of how networks become central to securing the conditions of circulation, and compellingly situates within neoliberal project of capitalizing all aspects of human relation. If there is a weakness in her essays, it is perhaps only that they do not clearly enough negotiate the transition from the governmental exercise of biopower to the privatized exercise by capital demonstrated in by Zuckerberg’s empire. This calls for is a more detailed anatomization of the collaborative and contradictory relations at play in the relations between platform capitalism and the capitalist state in the development of networked biopower-- of the sort on display in the virtual appearance of Zuckerberg before the anti-trust congressional hearing.

The integration of Marxian and Foucauldian analysis of network circulation posited by Terranova also opens towards a correction of the Eurocentrism of both thinks, by inviting comparison with the inversion of Foucauldian biopolitics in Achille Mbembe’s (2001; 2019a; 2019b) work on “necropolitics”. Mbembe’s account of "contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death", a subjugation that includes not just the power to kill, but to allow to die, for example by starvation or disease or sustained social oppression or exposure to ecological disaster. It is applied specifically to the postcolonial situation of racialized populations. Mbembe’s work can be read as a scathing corrective to Marx’s Eurocentric analysis of “universal intercourse” and the way it grossly overlooks the experience of populations, for whom the “intolerability” of capitalist verkher did not gradually become apparent but was rather immediately inflicted as slavery, conquest and genocide. The relevance of “necropolitical” analysis to digital circulation is explicit in his recent discussion of “digital computation” as a “deglobalizing” weapon of “boderization”. In this process, ubiquitous computation is part of “the process by which world powers permanently transform certain spaces into places that are impassable to certain classes of people”, a social division that operates both externally, on international frontiers excluding migrants and internally in the divisions of subtly and not-so-subtly racially segregated regions, cities, prisons and internment camps (2019b).

Our “circulationary” approach to the sequence of platforms, populisms, pandemics and riots therefore lies through a synthesis of Marxian concepts of labour-power, Foucauldian biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics. From that perspective, we present preliminary observations on our four main topics—platforms, populisms, pandemics and riots.

Platforms: Biopolitical Companies

Nick Srnicek’s (2015) model of a platform capitalism has been crucial for understanding the operations of Big Tech and the larger digital sector it dominates. Srnicek describes platform capitalism as a system in which the ownership of digital networks from which users launch a variety of online activities yield data that becomes key to diverse methods of profit extraction. To better understand the specificity of platform capital within the larger capitalist  economy, we extend Srnicek’s work to propose that platform capitalism be understood as a manifestation of capital’s increasingly circulatory priorities of advertising (Google, Facebook), retail sales (Amazon), of production of the digital means of circulation (Apple, Microsoft), and of  the integration of circulation back into production via control of increasingly crucial data-centres and cloud-computing infrastructures (Mosco 2017).

As Matt Cole (2017) describes, platforms, with their circulatory emphasis, offer users the multiple possible subject-positions—as workers, content-generating “free labour” (Terranova), commodity purchasers, data sources, advertising targets, infrastructure renters and self-employed entrepreneurs, and shareholders. Such multiplicity poses problems for classic Marxian accounts of surplus-value extraction, exploitation and labour power. Attempting to analyze platform operations through the lens of value-theory, as Cole attempts, does not so much restore the validity of traditional categories as reveal how far they are over-spilled by Big Tech’s far ranging mobilization of workers and users.

It is thus useful to pursue Joshua Herder’s (2019) proposition that Big Tech corporations are biopolitical companies with “the means and the intention to govern populations”. It is this internal expansion and diversification of control techniques, by which boundaries of the employer’s workplace power over employees expanded out over a wider range of liminal, “twilight zone” social relations that gives  owners of Big Tech corporations the profile and charisma of sovereign  authority, both realizing and exalting the despotic aspect of capitalist ownership described by liberal critics of corporate “private government”(Anderson 2017). This is the grain of truth embedded in the rambling reactionary manifestos of Silicon Valley’s “dark enlightenment” ideologues, with their celebrations of a monarchical CEOs (Land 2017). It is also what arouses fears of Big Tech swaying or usurping the authority a liberal order designated to government.

These new monarchs—Rob Larson (2018) neatly dubs them “bit tyrants”–have, however, faced rebellions, both within and beyond their immediate workplaces. Indeed, when a writer for The Economist, Adrian Wooldridge, first popularized the phrase “Big Tech”, he deployed it alongside another neologism, “Techlash”, to indicate what he anticipated as a rising wave of popular discontent with Silicon Valley oligopolists. “Big Tech” and “techlash” are terms that entered popular vocabulary simultaneously—a demonstration, perhaps, of Foucault’s enigmatic aphorism that “resistance comes first” (1997, 167)! Discussing this dissensus in the context of AI research, Dyer-Witheford, Kjosen and Steinhoff (2109) write of a “heptagon of struggles” involving  gig worker strikes against precarity; Silicon Valley programmer revolts against sexism and military and police contracts; anti-surveillance movements; protests against algorithmic bias in policing, hiring and welfare; “smart city” disturbances; social media defections from toxic digital milieu; and anti-trust agitation against concentrations of ownership. Additions can be made to the polygonal diagram: for example, the mounting environmental concerns demonstrated by Amazon workers walkouts against Bezos in 2019. The scope and multifarious nature of these unrests, occurring within and without workplaces, interacting with one another, and involving many intersectional dynamics shows a nascent and insurgent biopolitics against Big Tech.

However, the “heptagon of struggles” diagram overestimates the political consistency of anti-big tech sentiment, glossing over bifurcations within the wave. There are right and left versions of such revolt. Anti-state surveillance sentiment, objections to toxic social media environments (though with toxicity interpreted from a conservative viewpoint) and antitrust sentiment (from a libertarian, free market perspective) can be all be articulated in a conservative, or indeed neofascist, mix. Techlash was itself conflicted. The very term in some ways misnames and falsifies the scope and depth of the problem—as if digital networks were devices which could be easily rejected and reacted against, rather than an integral, organic circulatory part of a global capitalism. The questions raised by techlash rapidly became whether, how far, and in what version, it could be articulated with the only force apparently capable of restraining and regulating Big Tech—Big Government.

Populisms: Disintegrating Hegemonies

Nancy Fraser (2017) writes of a “hegemonic crisis” in US politics, produced by the collision of three projects:  the “progressive neoliberalism of the Obama administration, and two competing “populisms”— “reactionary” (Trump), and “progressive” (Sanders). These projects can be seen as responses to changes in the class composition of capital, changes in large part arising from the new circulatory paths of US capital, paths in whose making digital technology have provided a crucial infrastructure and in which giant digital corporations often blazed the way. These include the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to China and other low wage areas (a process in which Apple and Microsoft were leaders0; the replacement of factory -work by lower paid service and logistic labour (in 2019 Amazon became the second largest private employer in the US, after Walmart); an increasing reliance on an intensely digitized  financial sector, whose 2008 Wall Street catastrophe was redeemed by the stock market ascent of Big Tech, whose billionaire leaders became iconic figures of the 1% of super-wealth accumulated through these processes

These changes were socially traumatic in terms of unemployment, precarity and inequality. Each of the hegemonic projects identified by Fraser addressed this trauma in different ways. Obama’s “progressive neoliberalism”—by far the most comfortable with the growing power of Silicon Valley—essentially doubled down on the project of a dollar-dominated globalization, decking it out with meritocratic affirmations of identity politics of race and gender. Against this Trump’s reactionary populism asserted a white-supremacist US nationalism, asserting liberal elites and foreign migrants as enemies of the people, while Sanders attempted a left assertion of the people against corporate oligarchs.

Accepting this characterization, it is evident that each of these three hegemonic projects—but particularly the two populisms—have used, and in part been constituted by, the communicative powers Big Tech has unleashed, becoming “digital parties” (Gerbuado 2018). The electoral powers of social media were first thoroughly exploited by Obama’s 2012 campaign. These same powers were then used to in a deeper, more covert iteration to destroy progressive neoliberalism as Steve Bannon and other Trump strategists orchestrated their brilliant and scandalous Facebook/Cambridge Analytica/alt-right meme factory/Russian cyberwar blitzkrieg of 2016. Meanwhile Sanders attempted to activate a countervailing digital activism flowing from the Occupy movements.

Each of these contending projects has also grappled with the issue not only of how to use platform capitalism, but also of how to rule it—of how to fit the towering economic and cultural influence of Big Tech into a viable “hegemonic bloc”. Thus, Obama’s Blackberry-flourishing embrace of Silicon valley was succeeded by the contradictory “love-hate” relation between Trump and the tech titans, in which the infatuation of the President, and his alt.right supporters with tweets and memes coexists with accusations of censorship and threats of conservative regulation. At the same time, the mounting “techlash” against info- oligopolies shaped left populist efforts with, gig-economy labour reforms and anti-trust regulation figuring prominently in the political platforms of both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, whose promise was, however, extinguished in the muffled opacities of a Biden/Harris Democratic ticket.

Hegemony theory provides a useful lens through which to examine the permutations of the US electoral parties and Big Tech. However, haunting such an analysis is the question of whether platform capitalism has reconfigured and perhaps even undermined the very grounds of hegemonic struggle. Discussing the Trump regime, Mike Davis (2018) has suggested that the  neoliberal logics US capital has unleashed worldwide have now so far recursively  disintegrated the social and institutional fabric of the planet’s prime capitalist power to such a degree as to throw into question the possibility of a coherent, collective national  political project for the US.

Amongst these disintegrative forces, most of which involve the increasing transnational circulation of capital, must be counted Big Tech itself. Its contributions to the decompositionary logic include both the fissiparous inequalities of its employment models, but also speed, volatility and amplifications, of a so-called social media, whose superimposition of “universal discourse” on a polis already riven by social antagonisms generates intensely “antisocial” outcomes (Marantz 2019). The most disturbing question about Big Tech and hegemony is therefore  that of how far its circulatory accelerations of political processes has undone the conditions of the long drawn out and gradual Gramscian hegemonic “war of position” imagined by so much of left theory today, opening rather onto a more fluid, destabilizing  and dangerous “war of maneuver” phase, or even onto some form of post-hegemonic politics, tilting even towards the possibilities (seen by both Marx and Foucault on the horizon of bourgeois society) of civil war.

Pandemic: Screen New Deal?

That the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak of 2020 is in broad terms a biopolitical crisis of capitalist circulation is evident. The viral contagion was most probably unleashed in Wuhan by as expansion of industrial circuits into previously untouched forest areas, then relayed around the world by the travel industry and supply chain logistics, compelling a recoil lockdown of trade, transport and social mobility, plunging the world into economy recession (Malm 2020). Equally striking is the way in which the abrupt constriction of physical circulation generated a compensatory hypertrophy of digital circulation—and a bonanza for Big Tech. 

Google and Facebook at first appeared threatened by the decrease in advertising revenues as lockdowns constricted worldwide commerce; some lesser platform capitalists, such as Uber, saw profits tumble; and start-ups were destroyed by the general economic paralysis. But in general, the catastrophe favored the giant digital corporations, for the obvious reason that under pandemic conditions life became more intensively networked than ever, as sociality was virtualized; online shopping became doubly attractive; work was conducted from home; app ordered food delivery flourished and ed-tech applications boomed. Moreover, while the crisis produced some surprise developments within the technology sector—the meteoric rise of virtual conferencing company Zoom is the main example—the crisis generally favored the established behemoths, who took advantage of the woes of smaller digital fry to expand their prodigious merger and acquisitions. 

As Covid-19 raged around the world, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet all attained of market worth of more than a trillion dollars; even more remarkably, these corporations alone  entirely accounted  for the continued buoyancy of US stock markets after massive state intervention pulled it back from its March 2020  death-dive. The pandemic also saw an abrupt shift in the previously critical tone of journalistic coverage of Big Tech; a new chorus declaring the end of the “techlash” that had followed the 2016 election scandals and swelled the sails of left populism, reminding North Americans of the indispensable services and benefits supplied by high tech corporations. This refurbished image was based not on only the renewed importance of  networks under plague conditions, but also by the promise of new pandemic fighting medical applications, such as the celebrated Apple-Google  contact tracing app.[4] If  salvation from the pandemic seemed to lie in the hands of vaccine-searching Big Pharma, it was Big Tech that would sustain populations through the purgatorial wait and pastorally fend off further sinful biohazards.

Witnessing these tendencies, observers such as Frank Foer (2020) warn of the likelihood of a “power grab” effected by lucrative health care compacts between platform capitalism and federal and state agencies. In a similar vein, Naomi Klein (2020) speculates on a  fresh moment of “disaster capitalism” in which government and info-oligopolies take advantage of the crisis to propel adoption of a fresh accumulatory model based not only on high-tech health care apps but supposedly pandemic-proof smart cities that hermetically seal biohazardous humans off from one another in  virtualized cocoons—an arrangement that she  dubs, in ironic reversal of the left populist Green New Deal, the “Screen New Deal”.

These warnings of crisis-catalyzed deepening of the privatization of health care, urban design and social interaction are credible. Precisely because of this, however, it is important to highlight that contrary conclusions might be drawn from digital capital’s augmented pandemic status. The exposure of continuing digital divides cutting off impoverished and rural areas of the country from high bandwidth connection; the manifest vulnerability of platform capitalist gig-workers to economic crisis and, often, their exposure to virally dangerous work conditions; the “infodemic” of false and misleading medical news spread by social media; the emergency “essential service” standing of digital networks; and the discrepancy between stock-market prosperity and street-level immiseration, all open onto arguments and actions for public oversight and control of Big Tech, and the establishment of new digital circulations that are at once wider and rotate in a reverse direction from those that currently exist.

Riots: Tech in Flames

A nascent circulation of struggles in and against platform capitalism had begun to emerge in North America by 2016. By far the largest and most important social rebellion in the US in several decades was, however, the Black Lives Matter riots and protests ignited in March of 2020 by the murder of George Floyd. The immediate target of this uprising was police violence against black people, a cause that implicated an entire social order of white supremacy. In its unfolding, however, it also collaterally identified and contested an originating compact between Big Tech and the state, a compact for the security of capital that lies at the very origins of the technology industry, but that is today searingly illuminated in the militarized policing of a racialized proletariats. This compact is a manifestation of the networked “necropolitics” described by Mbembe, and, using other terminologies, by Jackie Wang (2018), Safiya Noble (2018), Ruha Benjamin (2019) and other recent theorists of the rendezvous between race, capital and technology. This work also, however, reveals some of the possibilities for counter-power inherent in the circuits of platform capitalism.

In regard to Black Lives Matter, these factors can be set out in a schematic fashion as follows: i) the history of the surveillance of  slave populations in the US to suppress slacking, flight or insurrection (Browne 2015);  ii) the contemporary  modulation  of this legacy in the high-tech policing of black communities by drones, stingrays, fusion centres and predictive policing algorithms iii) the counter history of black sousveillance  of police, and the emergence in 2013 of Black Lives Matter as a movement enabled by the recording and circulation capacities of the smart phone, backed by hashtag activism of Black Twitter—capacities used not just to document police violence, but also in the organization of  protests against it, such as those in Ferguson and Baltimore in 2014 (Jackson et al. 2020) ; iv) the collision of these two opposed logics of repressive power and insurgent counter-power in the eruption of protests and riots catalyzed by the circulation of the video of George Floyd’s police murder,  and police attempts to surveil and suppress this explosion.

The involvements of Big Tech in this sequence is complex yet omnipresent. Some of the technologies of “big data policing” have been developed by specialized offshoots of its main complex—Facebook founder Peter Thiel’s Palantir is a case in point, as are companies such Clearview Ai. In other cases, the corporate giants themselves have a central involvement, as in Amazon’s involvement in facial recognition technologies and other police-integrated surveillance systems (Amazon Ring). Moreover, as activist researchers investigating another arena of racialized policing, that exercised by ICE and border police against Hispanic migrants and their families, have established, corporations such as Amazon and Microsoft complete to supply cloud computing and data analytic services to policing and paramilitary state agencies. And while Facebook and Twitter provided networks used by BLM activists and allies, these were at the same time combed by police for identifications and evidence on which to base the arrest and prosecution of protestors, becoming a digital  battlefield milieu on which both sides contended: thus, for example, Twitter, a famous venue for BLM hashtag activism was simultaneously used to monitor such activity by Dataminr, a data mining company in which Twitter itself was an original investor.

Thus one almost incidental effect of the 2020 BLM uprising has been to expose the collaborations of Big Tech with police and other state security forces, and its frequent entablements of far right  racist groups, embarrass its  leading corporations, and in some cases to produce changes in their behavior more significant than any resulting from left policy initiatives. In the context of city-engulfing riots and demonstrations, the furor over the use of algorithmically-biased facial recognition Ais compelled Google, Amazon and IBM to pause their work on such technologies; forced Twitter, and then, with painful reluctance, Facebook, to label President Trump’s racist postings as misleading provocations; and also highlighted the issue of Silicon Valley’s racialized hiring patterns in ways that no amount of lavish “blackwashing” public-relations gestures could obscure. BLM is, as we have noted, a highly networked movement. Such dissident digitalism—a growing feature of social movements at the start of the twenty first century—is often cited in a Panglossian way as evidence of progressive nature of Big Tech’s innovations. However, what the BLM uprising suggests is that at a certain point these uprisings, and their platforms, will begin to challenge giant digital corporations’ deep complicity with systemic inequalities, and with the apparatus of state repression.  

Struggles in Circulation/Circulation of Struggles

The Black Lives Matter uprising has its own ineradicable historical specificity, but also affinities with other recent networked social rebellions. 2018 to 2020 saw a world-wide explosion of urban insurrection from Paris to, Hong Kong, Santiago, Quito, Beirut, Barcelona, Tehran, Baghdad and many other locations, in what has been described as a “global rebellion against neoliberalism” (Ehrenreich 2019). The protests have been characterized by their scale, paralyzing major cities and surrounding areas; their duration, often lasting for months; and the intensity of their confrontations with security forces.

Joshua Clover (2016) has argued that riots are the paradigmatic form of resistance in a capitalism that has become increasingly “circulatory”.  In classic Marxist thought, production—the making of commodities—is the heart of capital. The workplace, the point of production, is thus the crucial site of workers’ collective counterpower, and the strike—pre-eminently, the industrial factory strike—their key weapon. But Clover postulates that at certain phases in the history of capitalism production becomes enveloped or subsumed by the larger apparatus of circulation that connects production to the market. In these contexts, he suggests, the key manifestation of resistance becomes, not the factory-halting strike, but the city-stopping riot that halts capitalist circulation and challenges its police guardians by taking over streets, highways, and urban complexes.[5] Revolt gravitates towards riot.

Clover’s work was formulated amidst the “occupy” movements following the financial crash of 2008 but finds its full concrete adequation in the recent international outburst of uprisings. We would add to Clover’s thesis that such insurrections take over not only the physical networks of circulation—roads, ports, airports—but also its digital networks (Dyer-Witheford, Brenner-Reyes and Liu 2020). They construct of “riot platforms”, appropriating social media, deploying encrypted communication, hacking police systems—and also make networked trans-planetary connections with one another. Struggle in and against a circulatory capitalism engages in “a circulation of struggles”—a phrase that brings us to another theoretical source of our analysis.

Clover’s analysis of riots aligns with a broad current of “communisation” thought emphasizing the socially disintegrative force of capital, including its disintegration of trades unions and workers movements (Nous 2015). We also, however, draw on another tradition with which communisation theory has complex, contentious relations—that of Marxist operaismo (“workerism”), with its emphasis on circulating revolt arounds the “social factory”. Our “circulationary” approach to the sequence of platforms, populisms, pandemics and riots resumes a path of Marxian biopolitics-from-below proposed by post-operaismo theorists Michael Hardt and Toni Negri in their Empire trilogy (2000; 2004; 2011).

Our analysis shares with that work an insistence on taking seriously Foucault’s injunction that “resistance comes first”, or at least on understanding the development of cybernetic technologies, digital capital and of Big Tech itself in the light of  successive explosions of social antagonism and “cycles of struggle” (Dyer-Witheford 1999)—even if “cycles” today sounds too orderly to comprehend social conflagrations that spring up, die down and then burst out again like climate-change induced wildfires. But it does so in tenor different from that of Hardt and Negri’s thought, which, in our opinion, became seized with a technological accelerationism at odds both with the insights of the workerism from which it derived and contemporary problems of ecological crisis it must confront.

To take up again an analysis of the circulation of struggles in networked capitalism demands more fully coming to terms with the negativity of networks, and the necropolitical consequences of the “general intellect” capital confiscate from its networked populations. This negativity manifests materially, in terms of mines, electronics assembly, and endlessly clickwork; socially, in the circulation of hate, the activation of neo-fascisms, the dissemination of rumors and lies and the production of cyberwar; and psychologically, in dopamine blasted attention-spans. Only by confronting these aspects of capitalist digitization—the powers that make the “universal discourse” of the world market truly “intolerable”— can we start to conceive a countervailing version of digitization.

We would at like to discuss on this site any plausible prospects for a network-to-come. But for the time being, we’ll rest with a more somber suggestion—that any analysis of contemporary techno-struggles requires a full reckoning with the ambivalence acknowledged by Marx (1853) when he admits that the proletariat contains tendencies both to revolution and to submission as an “instrument” of capital. This uncertainty introduces an ambiguous or even aleatory element into class struggle. It is an ambiguity that today inhabits the many forms of the biopower capital mobilizes in today’s planet factory. It is an uncertainty that defines the situation of populations that not only teeter on the cusp between acceptance of a calamitous social trajectory and rebellion against it but can also subscribe to neofascism as a revolutionary crisis-solutions. It is only in the light of such undecidability—rather than in the service of programmatic confidence or catastrophism—that analysis of class composition become an instrument capable of yielding unexpected, hence politically useful, results.

For the spirals of networked conflict are not necessarily moving upward. These are circuits that relay at least as much of social decomposition as recomposition. Now is not the hour of a technologically empowered multitude, though it may the time of “socialism or barbarism” or, pace Andrea Malm, of “capitalist emergency” or “war communism” (Luxemburg 1915; Malm 2020). Malm’s phrase, however, reminds us that, so far, the current crisis has thwarted and baffled both the Leninist tradition from which he writes, and the autonomist and communizing schools that inform our analysis: the question of organization is, yet again, thrown into crisis. The most immediately apparent consequence of the circulations we chart include towering pyramids of digitized inequality, the memes of a newly virulent far right, and frantic attempts to contain proliferating planetary biohazards, of which Covid-19 is only one. If we insist on the potential of these dynamics not only to spawn profound social negativity, but also to generate new emancipatory powers, it is not out of faith in any progressive historical teleology or even from any  ethic of  optimism[6], but from a recognition, reinforced by the events of the last few months, that complex, chaotic circulatory turbulences have  a tendency to surprise; in such unexpected moments may appear paths from circulation to revolution.

Thanks to Alessandra Mularoni for conversations that helped shape this essay.

  

Notes

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