by EMILIE BICKERTON
The Googleplex, Google’s original and largest corporate campus PHOTO/Wikipedia
With the 2000–01 dot.com crash there came something of a discursive shake-out. It was in the early post-crash years that Nicholas Carr’s Does it Matter? (2004) was published, puncturing ‘new economy’ hype. But with the Greenspan bubble and massive state-intelligence funding after 9.11, American tech was soon on its feet again. Tim O’Reilly’s coining of the ‘Web 2.0’ buzzword in 2004 captured the returning optimism. The blog craze, Wikipedia and the first wave of social media all came into play during these years, and it was now that the landscape of tech giants was consolidated: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. The technology discourses of this phase echoed the developing shape of the Web: with ‘open source’ (another O’Reilly buzzword) and Wikipedia, it was argued that undefined crowds could be superior producers of content and code than named (or paid) individuals.
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The People’s Platform looks at the implications of the digital age for cultural democracy in various sectors—music, film, news, advertising—and how battles over copyright, piracy and privacy laws have evolved. Taylor rightly situates the tech euphoria of the late 90s in the context of Greenspan’s asset-price bubble, pointing out that deregulated venture-capital funds swelled from $12bn in 1996 to $106bn in 2000. Where tech-utopians hailed the political economy of the internet as ‘a better form of socialism’ (Wired’s Kevin Kelly) or ‘a vast experiment in anarchy’ (Google’s Eric Schmidt and the State Department’s Jared Cohen), she shows how corporations dominate the new landscape: in 2013 Disney and TimeWarner’s shares were up by 32 per cent, cbs’s by 40 per cent and Comcast’s by 57 per cent. The older tech and culture-industry corporations have ‘partnered’ with the new: at&t with Apple, Disney and Sony with Google. The major record labels have stakes in Spotify, as has Fox in Vice Media, while Condé Nast has bought up Reddit. In contrast to the multiple distribution grids that once purveyed telephony, tv, radio and film, nearly everything is now carried on cable or wireless ‘unichannels’, monopolized in the us by a handful of giants: at&t, Verizon, TimeWarner, Comcast.
Their scale is matched by the newcomers. Google, which accounts for 25 per cent of North American consumer internet traffic, has swallowed up a hundred firms since 2010. With over a billion users, Facebook has enrolled more than a seventh of the world’s population. A third of global internet users access the Amazon cloud on a daily basis. As Taylor pointedly notes, the main source of Facebook’s and Google’s profits is other firms’ advertising expenditure, an annual $700bn in the us; but this in turn depends on the surplus extracted from workers who produce ‘actual things’. The logic of advertising drives the tech giants’ voracious appetite for our data. In 2012 Google announced it would be collating information from its multiple services—Gmail, maps, search, YouTube, etc.—to combine the ‘knowledge person’ (search queries, click-stream data), the ‘social person’ (our email and social media networks) and the ‘embodied person’ (our physical whereabouts, tracked by the phones in our pockets) into a single ‘3d profile’, to which advertisers can buy access in real time. Facebook, which is now bundling users’ offline purchases with their profiles, ‘to make it easier for marketers to reach their customers’, as Mark Zuckerberg put it, had a market value of $104 billion on the day of its ipo. Without our ‘likes’ and comments, our photos and tweets, our product ratings or restaurant reviews, these companies would be worth nothing.
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