The Digital Commons, Means of Software Production, Reproduction of Software Labour, and the Actuality of Communist Production
Ahmet Gire
In this article, the means of software production used for software production will be investigated. The distinctive features of the means of software production from other means of production will be pointed out and the effects of these features on the capitalism will be discussed. First, it should be noted that the means of software production mostly consist of digital commons. No price is paid for the acquisition of these means, whether they are produced by wage labour or not. Therefore, software production does not require enormous capital accumulation. Especially, the history of programming languages shows how the
productive power of human labour has increased in the field of software and emphasizes that this increase in productive power should be interpreted together with an accumulation in digital commons. After demonstrating the common structure of means of software production, the article argues that these means, organized as commons in the capitalist mode of production, also play the role of fixed capital for capitalist production. However, as tried to be shown in the article, the common means of production mobilized to produce capital also reveal the possibility of breaking of the shell of capitalist production relations. The commonality of the means of software production can give an idea of communist production.
Keywords: Software, fixed capital, commons, capitalism, open source
Digitalisation and the Future of Labour: An Interview with Ursula Huws
Adem Yesilyurt – Hülya Kendir
Translated by Gökhan Demir
Digital Future Imaginations, Capitalist Realism and Commoning
Alper Aslan
Dijital dispositifs have begun to rule our entire lives. Artificial intelligence can do amazing and impressive work in many fields. Many imagine that in the future, artificial intelligence will increase productivity and solve the world’s problems. Moreover, some argue that artificial intelligence will evolve into superintelligence that will be almost as powerful as God, and will remove the distinctions between the virtual world and the real world. All these imaginations are stuck in capitalist realism: They list the incredible things that artificial intelligence can do for capitalism, but they cannot end property relations. First, in this article, we will focus on how artificial intelligence works. Next, we will show how artificial intelligence imaginations relate to capitalist realism. Finally, we will explain how digital dispositifs can serve for commoning and talk about the importance of anonymity in this way.
Keywords: Dijital dispositifs, artificial intelligence, capitalist realism, commoning, anonymity
Aesthetic Resistance from Photographic Surveillance to Data Surveillance
Özlem Demircan
Art has been used throughout history as a fundamental means of visualization of authority in politics. Because of the indissociable structure of art and technology, the state and its corporate partners enhanced and reinforced their dominion and impact. But during the modern age, political powers used a variety of strategies to be able to secrete their image. Especially the development in information and communication technologies ensured that the power is not only invisible but also abstract. The usage of visual Technologies in line with these strategies intensified in the surveillance areas as well.
As an observation practice, surveillance is related with metaphors that highlight optical aspects which functions as a reference to photography or shooting techniques. Photographic seeing is related to a look through the camera with a sight that is already calculated and framed. This seeing not only functions as a means of classification, documentation, and aestheticization of society, individuals, and spaces by providing information to the observer behind the camera but became a mechanism of psychological power, discipline, and control. Furthermore, the ubiquity of surveillance systems as a context of power and political
power that provides surveillance, control, and discipline is based on the architecture of technologies, economic, political, and cultural processes designed for data monitoring and data collection methods with changing paradigms. This process innately constructed an aesthetic counter-discourse to be able to make visible the invisible dominance of political power and to build up resistance.
In this study, the origins of visual technology in the service of dominance and political power and how the use of visual language as a control mechanism has developed over time will be evaluated from a historical perspective. The potential of counter-surveillance methods to create an aesthetic resistance space that will reveal and represent the invisibility of power will be analyzed through the works of selected artists in the ongoing process with the internet being used in civilian life and the integration of society with digital systems, and in today’s network society whose fabric of life and infrastructure is woven with surveillance
technologies.
Keywords: Photography, panopticon, datasurveillance, artveillance, aesthetic resistance
Digital Transformation in Health
Mehmet Zencir
In this article, within the scope of neoliberal health reforms, the effect of digitalization on health services and health laborers is discussed. The study examines the effects of radical developments in the digital technologies, in association with the development of productive forces on health, in terms of the the statecapital relations and social relations. In the study, in which the depoliticized digital health narrative is associated with the capital accumulation process, a critical discussion was conducted on how mechanization, automation and digitalization affect the public health and labor process in the field of health.
Keywords: Digitalization, neoliberal health reforms, digitalization in health, digital health, political economic of digital health
Dataisation and the Political Economy of Work: A New Digital Taylorism?
Matthew Cole, Hugo Radice and Charles Umney
Translation: Ferda Uzunyayla, Selime Güzelsarı
The economic and social consequences of technological change in capitalist societies have always been profound. For capitalists themselves, new technologies can have pervasive effects, rendering obsolete even the most profitable businesses, while simultaneously creating opportunities for early adopters. For workers reliant on the sale of their labour power, the effects are even more differentiated: new technologies create opportunities for those who can acquire necessary skills, but destitution for those whose capabilities are no longer required. Beyond the immediate economic outcomes for individuals and their communities, there are spatial, organizational, and cultural consequences that transform the fabric of society. In his analysis of the workplaces of the first industrial revolution, Marx concludes that ‘Large-scale industry possesses in the machine system an entirely objective organization of production, which confronts the worker as a pre-existing material condition of production’, and elsewhere he defines this condition as the real subsumption of labour. A hundred years later, his analysis underpinned modern socialist studies of labour and the struggle for control in the workplace. Indeed, ever since the birth of industrial capitalism socialists have not only critically examined technology in its social context, but also looked forward to futures of work based on radically different principles. As Alfred Barratt Brown wrote in 1934, ‘We need to look at the whole world of industry with fresh eyes, to ask ourselves again what we want to produce, and how we can best employ our powers in producing it, to the end that the work and its results may alike satisfy human capacities and human needs’. This essay is concerned to look with fresh socialist eyes at the technologies that underpin our present world of work, and how they have been shaped and applied by capital to meet the needs of capital, oriented firmly towards the subsumption of wage labour in all its concrete forms. We cannot repurpose them towards our fundamental goal as socialists to build a world based upon equality and justice for all without directly challenging and contesting the existing social order. This requires, as always, both a broad vision of a sustainable, egalitarian and democratic society, and concrete proposals that can connect to existing struggles while also prefiguring radical change.
Capitalism in the Shadow of the Pandemic: Surveillance, Data Politics and Freedom
Nurhak Polat – Gülcan Ergün- Cihan Yapıştıran- Filiz Arıöz
Rapidly developing information technologies have brought about permanent changes in social life and the dynamics of capitalism. While digitalization has provided individuals and groups with greater participation, individual and collective freedom, on the other hand, it has transformed, expanded and decentralized the forms of control and surveillance of governments. With technologies and digital spaces that have become inevitable in many areas, mechanisms that expose individuals to continuous surveillance and that perpetuate surveillance and dataization practices in favor of governments and big technology companies are deepening. Discussions on these processes in the literature and in the public sphere are generally carried out within the framework of the dichotomy of liberation and authoritarianism. In the quest for conceptualization, the use and societal effects of digital technologies are often weighed against some sort of advantages and risks to individual and collective rights and freedoms. Generally, in countries or contexts that are defined as authoritarian, digitalization comes to the fore with concepts such as surveillance, oppression or authoritarianism, while in countries defined as liberal democratic, it comes to the fore with issues such as data security, privacy and personal rights. In this article, we examine how capitalist motives and surveillance practices are related to the issue of digital freedom and self-determination, starting from the fact that these systems are not disconnected from each other and that they are part of the same digital capitalist system. In the axis of digital surveillance capitalism, we aim to contribute to the discussion that in favor and against whom discourses, demands and motives shape the concept of freedom.
Keywords: Capitalism, COVID-19, data politics, digital surveillance technologies, digital self- determination
