Capitalism and the Internet: The Knowledge Economy |26 July 2017

One of the most crucial aspects that define capitalism is that the market is majorly concentrated by private ownership or properties.

Private actors own and control property in accord with their interests, and demand and supply freely set prices in markets.

Private property used to be about owning tangible assets like land or stocks and bonds.

However due to intense commodification and digitisation, the role of property ownership has changed significantly.

Privately owned companies like Google are now able to own not just stocks and bonds, but also information and knowledge.

The shift from analogue to digital has made it so much easier for online companies to store certain data such as our personal information.

These information become valuable resources for these companies; hence information becomes a primordial commodity.

One’s personal information can inform an e-business all about one’s location, age, trends and other significant data.

They collect them through monitoring membership and subscriptions, what we surf on the web, our browsing history and online buying habits.

Your information becomes their private property.

The implications of this are enormous for the consumers but extremely profitable for e-businesses. There are many names for this new shift but Fuchs calls it the ‘knowledge society’ or the knowledge economy, an untangible form of economic value based on information.

With this digital revolution businesses are able to profile us and sell us to online businesses through targeted adverts.

Hence digital capitalism has extended the traditional broadcasting media model.

This new advertising model is extremely important for the sustenance of some e-businesses because banner ads or any other type of online ads may be their only (or main) source of income.

In fact Google, the most visited website in the world, makes tonnes of money through targeted ads: when users use Google services they conduct “unpaid productive surplus-value generating labour” as Google generates and stores these data.

Google then sells their data to its Ad Sense clients who “provide advertisements that are targeted to the activities, searches, contents and interests of the users”.

Given that capitalism’s imperative is to create capital and gain profits, it is interesting how the use of data has facilitated the efficiency of how companies make money.

Elsie Pointe