Does anyone know of any good essays to read on the subject?
It seems to me like there are a lot of people who think the internet and all of the hardware that it necessitates simply just exists, and end up in a kind of technoutopian position without realizing that the imperial core countries' access to the internet is predicated on exploitation on a global scale.
I was reading "The Interface Effect" by Alex Galloway, and in the final essay he completely flattens the relationship between him (a tenured prof in NYC) with a gold miner in the global south by positing that "we are all gold miners" as though the labor of extracting gold is the same as the "labor" of browsing amazon. To be fair, he was writing about primarily about WOW gold IIRC, not real gold, but again, how is westerners paying a pittance to a Chinese teenager mining WOW gold the same as casually browsing the internet. (This was published in 2008)
I've seen this a lot over the last few years too, positioning the primarily useless data that is harvested from westerners browsing the internet as the same type of exploitation of someone who actually produces the hardware it all relies on. It all coalesces in the terribly liberal idea that we should be paid for the data we create, as though information on what treats I shove into my mouth are actually valuable in any real sense. This isn't to say that the mass data we all produce using the internet wouldn't be tremendously valuable for a planned economy, but that it is itself a commodity we should be paid for. I just can't get over the inane idea that westerners deserve more of the surplus value created by the miner and factory worker who actually produce the hardware. Wouldn't it make more sense to demand that the chain of labor that produces the hardware should receive the majority of this surplus value, not a dude in NYC buying cheap commodities on Amazon?
Really any essays that negotiate the "liberatory" potential of the internet with a materialist account of its creation would be of interest.
Edit: to throw my net even wider, I would appreciate any essays/books on commodity fetishism in general
I can tell you it would make a wonderful PhD dissertation. I turned up nothing along the lines you describe after trying some advanced searches in various library catalogs, databases, and G**gle Scholar. All a bunch of cultural criticism critical theory nonsense like commodity fetishism as it relates to cultural objects. Example: "“Some Unholy Alloy”: Neoliberalism, Digital Modernity, and the Mechanics of Globalized Capital in Cormac McCarthy’s The Counselor" . I'm nodding along for the first dozen or so words of the title like "this might be lit" and then...
That's true. It seems like there is a lot to be written about it, and I wasn't able to find anything on it either. Time to read more Marx, but I was hoping to find anything that even hinted at this.
It's truly amazing what came up when I was searching for this. Hits such as:
"Rocko’s Magic Capitalism: Commodity Fetishism in the Magical Realism of Rocko’s Modern Life" - Could someone write a more useless paper?
"Could the Internet Defetishise the Commodity?" - lol, no
"Breaking The Dragon's Gaze: Commodity Fetishism In Tolkien's Middle-Earth" - lmfao, are you fucking kidding me?
"The Affections of the American Pickers: Commodity Fetishism in Control Society" -holy shit, stop watching the history channel
its not exactly what youre after and i dont think it specifically discusses the internet, but david graebers fetishism as social creativity is really interesting reading (its about 30 pages from memory)
partly an anthropological look at the actual african fetishes (directly and through the lens of the racist european traders who fed the concept back to marx et al) and the marxian idea of commodity fetishism, and the way that social relations are created and projected when we imbue objects we created with power over ourselves. i think the ideas would be relevant when thinking about the internet too
edit: just in general, i feel that commodity fetishism is a more important concept than marx gave it credit for with that tiny little bit in capital, and graeber in particular was always really interested in looking at social relations inherent in objects (from a more anthropological perspective but with marx clearly in mind) - towards an anthropological theory of value and debt the first 5000 years are also excellent for teasing out the concept more
Great, thanks I'll check it out! I totally agree with you re: Marx, its one of the ideas I wish he wrote more on. I've put off reading much of Graeber's work, so I'll give those a look too
The Stack by Benjamin Bratton is adjacent to what you are after, but not hitting the bullseye exactly. Might be worth a look.
'The Stack' is the 'accidental megastructure' of capital that operates via protocols of law and tech, etc.
Cool, that looks interesting. I feel like I've seen his name before, maybe via eflux when they were publishing a lot on "planetary computing".
Thanks for the recommendation!
