Mislav Žitko’s research while affiliated with University of Zagreb and other places

The paper discusses how personal data is a crucial resource in the digital age. It explores the complex nature of the economic valorisation of personal data. Recent discussions have focused on the commodification and profit generation from personal data and its role as an asset and a source of rent. Property rights play a significant but contradictory role in each of these cases. From a technical standpoint, personal data does not fall under traditional ownership rights protected by intellectual property laws. It is neither an artistic work covered by copyright nor an outcome of financial investment that could be protected by patents. Instead, the paper focuses on the role of personal data in the capitalist mode of production and digital monopoly conditions. It aims to analyse the successive transformations of everyday activities into machine-readable objects, de facto property, assets, and elements of monopoly capital.

Revisiting the history of the development of software and communication technologies, this article demonstrates that while the early techno-utopian theories have been balanced by more sombre approaches, the emancipatory potential of productions whose outputs do not take the commodity form deserves further theoretical reflection. Social form and value-form literature provides a way to rethink publicly financed activities and activities of software communities as a variety of social forms of wealth and productions within capitalist social formations. Public wealth, it is argued, is a useful umbrella concept to approach the forms of wealth in the sphere of software, media and communication. With digitally storable matter, due to its replicability at near zero cost, it is of utmost importance that the state provides an institutional framework, primarily for capital, but also for public wealth, to be coded. In this setting, legal form, its content and function play a key role in the contested reproduction between forms of public wealth and capital.

In this article, we provide a critique of the concept of crony capitalism as the dominant explanation of change in economies in transition-based as it is on an idealized technocratic representation of ‘free markets’. We do this through an analysis of the fall of the Croatian company Agrokor, one of the most important companies in post-socialist Southeast Europe. The Agrokor case allows for an understanding of state-economy restructurings in times of crisis, and the competing temporalities and rhythms of corporate practices, political interventions and public perceptions. Agrokor can be considered as a symbol of many of the unfolding contradictions of transnational capitalism in the semi-periphery. The nature of Agrokor’s demise is understood as a result of the hyper-financialization of the firm and the rise of transnational predatory finance. The translation of liquidity and debt crises into a fundamental restructuring of the conglomerate, ushering in a shift in power and control, is the product of active work by a range of agents and an attempted resolution, partial and unfinished, of a struggle for dominance between fractions of capital.

As outrage over the socially damaging practices of technology companies intensifies, this book asks what it actually means to hold a 'monopoly' in the tech world and offers an in-depth analysis of how these corporate giants are produced, financialized, and regulated.

There are various Marxian approaches towards understanding monopoly. The most direct and sustained is the monopoly capitalism perspective (for example, Baran & Sweezy, 1968; Magdoff & Sweezy, 1987; Foster, 2014a), tied to the Monthly Review magazine. This uniquely American school of thought takes monopoly as the latest developmental stage in the capitalist mode of production. Its main authors argue that the 19th-century capitalism was shaped by similarsized producers in an environment of intense industrial competition. The main argument is that, since the 1970s, capital increasingly escapes production and enters a speculative domain of financialization. This results in monopoly-finance capitalism, a specific regime of capital accumulation benefitting a tiny minority of capital lenders and shareholders, transnational companies, and corporate owners and managers (Magdoff & Sweezy, 1987; Sweezy, 1994; Foster, 2016). According to these authors, capitalism has now entered a stage of increasing concentration of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer companies and owners. While this thesis holds some weight towards describing the contemporary snapshot of GAFAM's oligopoly, it cannot explain the specificities of the platform business model, commodity chains on digital platforms we described in Chapter 2, or legal forms necessary for the reproduction of capital through platforms. Moreover, it does not engage in theorizing value, surplus value, and money but, instead, replaces it with the concept of the economic surplus (Baran, 1956/ 1973; Barclay et al, 1975), thus severing ties with some of Marx's central concepts. Hence, monopoly as a stage in capitalist development does not explain how the platform economy went through its successive stages of competition, financial collapse, current oligopoly, and regulatory challenges, nor does it take sufficient account of the legal forms necessary to establish monopoly over technical discoveries through copyright and patents. From our perspective, there are three approaches grounded in Marxian theories that are useful for the analysis of digital platforms. First, understanding that monopoly is not a stage in capitalist development but a dynamic process enabled and/ or constrained by a specific regulatory regime. Second, understanding that monopoly is a process of concentration and centralization of capital visible in mergers and acquisitions across the history of capitalism.

In this chapter, we focus on the core dynamic between gathering and processing data with algorithms as means of production for generating and extracting surplus value, protected by patents, trade secrets, and copyrights. We do not know exactly what data companies collect, nor do we know exactly how algorithms process collected data. To study algorithms and data we are largely left with two main options: either to trace the flow of value in the form of money through technological forms, corporate production, and circulation, or to look at consequences of the deployment of (corporate) algorithms in various aspects of society (for example, credit scoring, recommendation systems, automobile navigation, personal assistants, news distribution, and so on). Taking the first option allowed us to focus on monopolization, advertising, regulation, and financialization in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. Now we turn to the social consequences of these techniques. We do not argue that technological forms through algorithmic techniques establish full-blown, dystopian, and static control. Datadriven companies usually provide a range of behavioural options in line with their assessments of users and their data, thus providing a dynamic balance between flexibility and prediction. Yet, as instruments of perception, analytical techniques focus on human attentiveness of people and things of interest while, at the same time, discarding much of the context from which these persons and things emerged (Amoore & Piotukh, 2015). Control through technological forms is, therefore, a conditioning and structuring mechanism in which the range of options is constantly adapted and individualized in real time to allow profit making and commodity exchange to occur seamlessly in the background. The rise of data-driven production needed a social and legal fabric on which to build. Corporate development needed openness for producing and sharing data among engineers and internet users. The first social foundation was secured through privatizing openness and knowledge in software production. This occurred through legal forms that allowed closure of software modifications, breaking up the chain of software sharing, enabling modifications to act as competitive advantages. We touched upon the difference between Free Software and Open Source in Chapter 2. The second foundation was secured by offering freeof-charge services. Free-of-charge services within the capitalist mode of production of advertising funded platforms are pre-commodities.

Digital platforms have expanded their scope from venture capital supported projects, towards global operations and multi-billion dollar oligopolies. However, the platform model is not entirely new. It was a common business model for newspapers, radio, and television. Before increasing commercialization through cable and satellite television, broadcasting was, for the most part, a state-supported monopoly only partially commercialized and privatized in many European countries. Production either relied on state subsidies through mandatory subscription payments in the public service model, or on advertising in the market oriented model. For example, audiences could freely listen to radio stations, while the state or the advertising industry provided funding for content production. Similarly, some digital corporations derive profits by providing advertising space for boosting sales and creating demand through the increase of consumption of products produced in other parts of the economy, obtaining their revenue from the circulation of commodities and capital in the economy as a whole. Additionally, they also produce their own means of production, such as software systems, algorithms, and AI, whose sales serve as an additional source of income and profits. What is new about the digital platform model, compared to traditional media, is the scope and scale of gathered data, along with automated and improved analysis. Analysing big data requires technical assistance because manual analysis is not possible, or even conceivable, in any reasonable or economically viable amount of time. While the traditional media model required separate firms and an entire industry for audience and market analysis (for example, Nielsen, PwC), platforms developed entirely new markets on their own, along with the tools for analysing those same markets. The scale of their operations and the accumulated background data on consumer preferences provide them with a comparative advantage that is difficult to match in the data-driven business. In this chapter, we focus on platforms, advertising, and users as elements of the specific business model within the capitalist mode of production. These elements occupy the centre of many mainstream and critical analyses. Focusing on platforms, advertising, and users allows us to connect the theoretical approach outlined in the discussion about social forms in Chapter 2 with the more empirically oriented Chapters 5, and 6.

Reports, debates, and calls for challenging the power of tech giants are common in business and daily press. Outrage over socially damaging practices is found across the public sphere with issues ranging from tax avoidance and anti-competitive behaviour to disinformation and hate speech distribution, privacy abuse, surveillance, and labour disputes. These regular signs of dissatisfaction put the political system on notice and create a sense of urgency for political action in the form of regulatory and policy responses. Despite widespread debates and clear indicators of their excessive power, very rarely do we encounter discussions as to what does it actually mean to hold a monopoly and what are the specific features of digital monopolies in the capitalist mode of production. Digital platforms as monopolies lead to a peculiar set of economic, political, and social configurations and consequences, whose negative tendencies remain to be adequately understood. In this book, we provide theoretical and empirical arguments for a better understanding of the character and consequences of digital monopoly platforms in contemporary capitalism. Much of the existing research on digital platforms tries to follow the latest technological developments by providing entirely new theoretical concepts. It is, however, common that new concepts suffer a double fate. First, they become outdated when new products and services appear in radically new forms, when they take the shape of new technological forms and social forms of wealth. Techno-optimism surrounding so-called user-generated content on social media and its alleged democratization potential in the public sphere is one case in point. Second, over time they are often exposed for reducing the explanatory power of the conceptual apparatus they build on. Over time, it became clear that user-generated content is a way for social media companies to gather and process data, and ultimately to profit from platform usage and accumulate capital and wealth. We try to avoid both problems by sticking with the classical Marxian theoretical frameworks while preserving the methodological space for new concepts and theoretical insights. Focusing on profit making as the driving force of capitalist firms, we alter the existing concepts and theoretical insights only when we come across empirically observed entities that play a functionally important role in profit making, yet whose role is not understood clearly enough with existing concepts and theories.

The starting point of the research presented in this book is defined by the simple fact that the platform economy, however one conceptualizes it, has been a part of the capitalist landscape for more than two decades. This empirical reality can be approached from different theoretical traditions and levels of inquiry. Our principal goal is to show that this relatively new reality of contemporary capitalism can become intelligible within the Marxian theoretical framework, and that, in turn, the Marxian approach is responsive enough to include insights from other theoretical traditions and schools of thought. We start from a rather abstract level of Marxian theory of value and social forms in order to proceed to the more concrete features of actually existing platform capitalism. Starting from the presentation of the inner workings of the Marxian research programme is important for several reasons. Most importantly, delineating key assumptions brings more epistemic clarity. Furthermore, certain strands of post-Marxism, most notably Postoperaismo and proponents of the cognitive capitalism hypothesis, have formulated their understanding of the so-called knowledge economy on the assumption that Marxian value theory, in its most prominent aspects, is obsolete. We will have more to say about the issues raised by Postoperaismo and related approaches in Chapter 4, but for now it will suffice to show that the key notions and concepts of the Marxian theory can be used to explain the rise and functioning of platform capitalism. This epistemic claim can be expressed in more historical terms: it implies that the rise of platform capitalism does not represent a radical break with the logic of capital accumulation that drove the capitalist development in the 19th and 20th century, notwithstanding all the disruption and breakdowns, real or imaginary. Thus, the novelty of digital platforms must be found on the more concrete level of inquiry, which overlaps and corresponds with the analysis of financialization, another phenomenon that marked the end of the post-Fordist regime of accumulation. From a Marxian perspective, the theory of money is the key for understanding the operations of financialized capitalism, for without settling the issue of the roles and functions of money in a capitalist economy financialization remains a set of loosely connected events and processes that usually appear as a parasitic burden on the back of the ‘real economy’. We will deal with some aspects of financialized platforms in Chapter 5.

As outrage over the socially damaging practices of technology companies intensifies, this book asks what it actually means to hold a 'monopoly' in the tech world and offers an in-depth analysis of how these corporate giants are produced, financialized, and regulated.