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Acknowledgements
The ideas in this book are in part a result of teaching-led research, in which students initially taught me that what I thought was a well-analysed subject (the digital economy) was problematic, and then helped with identifying the issues this book addresses. Thanks goes to all the students at the University of Sussex and at King’s College London who took the course ‘Digital Industries and Internet Cultures’. Colleagues at Polity Press were not only sympathetic but very helpful when the manuscript was delayed, and have been highly efficient in refining and producing the book; many thanks to Ellen MacDonald-Kramer and Mary Savigar as editors, Tim Clark for a thorough copy edit and Evie Deavall for production. Two anonymous reviewers provided feedback, much of which was helpful and I thank them for their time.
I had further and essential help from a wonderful network of scholars I meet at conferences, seminars, dinners and more; unfortunately there are too many to name but my thanks goes out to them all. The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics’ annual conference, the Centre for Digital Culture at King’s College London, and the Klein School of Media and Communication at Temple University all offered a chance to present my ideas about the digital economy, and the discussions at each were very helpful.
A few individuals helped particularly and I’d like to thank them: Tarleton Gillespie and Hector Postigo and all who attended the Philadelphia Culture Digitally meeting at which I presented some of these ideas in a confused way; Kim Humphery, particularly for her help on ideas about consumption politics; King’s College London colleagues in both Digital Humanities and Culture, Media and Creative Industries (including those like me who left); Joss Hands, Jodi Dean and David Castle for discussions as part of the Pluto’s Digital Barricades series; the dinners that have offered emotional and intellectual support with Kath Woodward, Mark Banks and Richard Collins; and colleagues at the University of Sussex, particularly those who helped during some very difficult issues there.
My children offer both a window into living the digital economy and huge amounts of fun; love to them both.
During the final stages of preparation of this manuscript my older brother Campbell died suddenly and unexpectedly. He was an example of someone who made the world better through daily acts of kindness and commitment, particularly in his work with the local life-saving club. Over a hundred people turned out when we scattered his ashes in the bay outside the home we grew up in – and that he lived in for much of his life – and the life-saving club that runs as a central thread through our family. I dedicate this book to him and to all those who make the world better though everyday moments; those who make the world a better place one everyday act at a time, or in Campbell’s case (among other sessions) one nippers’ session at a time.
1 The Meaning of the Digital Economy
Hype and #Hyper-hype
The digital economy has been an object of fear, fascination and greedy hope for over thirty years. The rise of the digital economy has been marked by a number of companies that are both hugely influential on society and are hugely financially successful. As the names roll off the tongue – Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Amazon, Tencent, Apple, etc. – who could deny the digital economy’s importance? But what is the digital economy? And how does it relate to wider social changes marked by the rise of the internet and the digital?
A start to answering these questions is to acknowledge the fog of hype that has so often surrounded and obscured them. And one thing the internet and the digital economy have never been short of is hype. From being the greatest revolution in humanity since, variously, the Gutenberg Press, the invention of language, the invention of the wheel and the taming of fire, the internet and the digital have not lacked boosters willing to proclaim their fundamentally transformative effects. This is not only true for the digital economy but is frequently true for it in a more intense way, often because of the great financial gain that seems possible. For the hashtag generation, the economic effects of the digital could easily be expressed as #hyper-hype. The over-reaching of some commentators – such as Anderson’s (2013) positing of a ‘second industrial revolution’ based on email, 3D printing and offshore factories, or Zuboff’s (2019) claim of a new stage of capitalism based on surveillance – should not blind us to changes that are important to the ways twenty-first century economies function.
There is, also, an opposite and just as unenlightening position about the digital economy to #hyper-hype that amounts to a shrug, expressed in various forms of the claim: ‘it’s really just the same old capitalism’. It is important in understanding the digital economy to see past claims it is a fundamental revolution or really nothing new at all. One way to turn down the brightness of #hyper-hype and disperse the fog of the anti-capitalist shrug is to define the question being asked more clearly and proceed to specify a path toward understanding the digital economy. This will be the task of this introductory chapter, starting with a question.
Either hyping or rejecting claims that there is a ‘digital economy’ all too often presuppose a question that is left implicit: When referring to the ‘new’ digital economy are we referring to changes that digital and internet socio-technologies have brought to the existing economy, turning the whole economy into a ‘digital economy’, or does the latter refer to a new kind of economic activity that can be called digital? For example, a McKinsey report into China’s digital economy placed heavy emphasis on the fast take-up of mobile payments as evidence of a quickly growing Chinese digital economy, but if we pause and think about mobile payments it is not clear whether they are indicators of the effect of digital mobility on the whole economy or are part of new economic practices which require such mobility (Woetzel et al. 2017). Any analysis that effectively collapses the digital economy into the whole economy will have a strong tendency to miss two things: first, the distinctiveness of the digital compared to prior economic processes; second, how much of the preceding economy remains non-digital. The danger is of a kind of selective blindness that sees digital processes everywhere but misses already existing practices, such as buying things in a supermarket, that remain a key part of the economy. To grasp what may be new and distinctive about the digital and the economy without giving in to either hyper-hype or dismissal of the digital as new, means accepting the premise that there was complex economic activity prior