Regulating Platforms. Terry Flew. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Terry Flew
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Кинематограф, театр
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509537099
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(Ostry et al., 2016, p. 38). Neoliberalism has been characteristically linked to the dominance of neoclassical economics in the fields of media and culture, given their focus upon rational choices made through markets by profit-maximizing firms and by individual consumers who seek to maximize personal satisfaction (Freedman, 2008; Hesmondhalgh et al., 2015; Hesmondhalgh, 2019).

      I have argued elsewhere that the concept of neoliberalism lacks analytical precision and risks becoming an omnibus category for any aspect of contemporary capitalism that a particular theorist finds objectionable (Flew, 2012). My point here is somewhat different: insofar as neoliberalism has relevance as a particular and more delimited historical, institutional, and policy project, its conceptual agenda should be seen as distinct from that of neoclassical economics (Flew, 2015b). The focus on‘creative destruction, derived from Schumpeter, was different from the one encountered in mainstream media and cultural economics. Instead of seeking market equilibrium, this evolutionary economics (Cunningham et al., 2015; Potts, 2011) pointed to the ways in which digital technologies and the ICT companies that expanded into new fields disrupted established industries and markets, and in so doing cancelled the split between old media and new media from media organizations (Mierzejewska, 2018).

      The second major connection between the art of government and the rise of political economy was how the turn towards a ‘frugal government’ (p. 37) necessitated the assumption of ‘naturalism’ (p. 61) in market economy, which was now understood to exist independently of government. The notion that market economy has ‘natural laws’ such as those of supply and demand became the corollary to a more utilitarian and strategic approach to government. Such an approach would be based on the calculation of the costs and benefits of state intervention and on the expectation that such interventions do not unduly disrupt the ‘natural order’ that a market economy represented. According to Foucault, this led to a distinctive understanding of the nature of freedom in liberal societies:

      Freedom … is not a universal which is particularised in time and geography. Freedom is not a white surface with more or less black spaces here and there and from time to time. Freedom is never anything other – but this is already a great deal – than an actual relation between governors and governed, a relation in which the measure of the ‘too little’ existing freedom is given by the ‘even more’ freedom demanded …

      Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose demonstrated the importance of economics to twentieth-century notions of governmentality, which, following Foucault, they defined as ‘a particular way of thinking about the kinds of problems that can and should be addressed by various authorities’ (Miller and Rose, 1990, p. 2). Miller and Rose argued that the phenomenon known as the Keynesian revolution in economic theory was grounded in new techniques of measuring and accounting for national economies that enabled new forms of economic policy, namely forms based upon ‘action at a distance’ – for example the use of interest rates, taxation policies, or government spending to increase the number of jobs or to constrain price inflation. From this perspective, the rise of neoliberalism – a phenomenon associated with economists such as Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Freidman, George Stigler, James Buchanan, and others – was marked by an insistence that the fine-tuning of aggregate economic variables was insufficient and ineffective when it came to achieving policy goals (Stedman Jones, 2012). Defending market capitalism on moral as well as on economic grounds, these economists proposed that government policy needed to be focused upon governing human behaviour in order to inspire a more market-oriented conduct in citizens and in businesses. This shift towards an ‘advanced liberal’ governmentality, to use Nikolas Rose’s term, proposed a ‘marketization of economic life’ and a new understanding of freedom: ‘Freedom, here, is redefined’ as ‘the capacity for self-realization which can be obtained only through individual activity’ (Rose, 1999, p. 145).

      A new, decentralized communication network, with the opportunities it offered, required the absence of state regulation, particularly over online speech. An early proponent of this argument was Ithiel de Sola Pool, who identified the potential for electronic communications to evolve into a new ‘technology of freedom’ (de Sola Pool, 1983). For this potential to be realized, de Sola Pool saw it as imperative that the new technologies be not regulated and that policymakers