Book Review: The Digital Economy

Firms like Meta and Google have become unprecedented vehicles for creating commodities, forms of marketing, networks of publicity, great wealth, ways of working, and they have arguably changed the nature of conflict too. Through broadening and valorising audiences, the digital economy has the proven capacity to provide new market opportunities, albeit with significant negative social ramifications caused by the accelerated processes of accumulation.

Jordan presses readers to defamiliarize themselves with the market practices they

believe they know so well because they are typically the main users too.

For example, with so many people working at the interface of desktop computers, the opening chapter gives considerable space to defining the ‘digital economy’, asking for a general rethinking of the assumption that it is simply the truck and trade in software.

What is at stake is how the practices with and by products, firms, consumers and ancillary services give rise to a hierarchy of claims.

In the conclusion Jordan suggests participatory digital practices could take priority, thereby ushering in a property regime which is more democratic than the one that dominates at the moment.

Jordan’s inquiry is first and foremost driven by the salient question of how property is made in the digital economy.

Google’s search algorithms, for instance, allow the data generated by communities of practice to become ‘read’ (that is, commodified).

This is another instance where practices appear to make a difference. Matters of trust and credibility in Google’s products set the scope for value too — value here understood as the viability for downstream data brokering.

However, like other sectors, if users do not trust Google’s search engine, then these properties will not receive use nor retain value.

How might disintermediation have wider social ramifications? As a template, take for example the theory of industrial society that Anthony Giddens (1990) and others built.

This theory highlighted that industrialization led to the reconfiguration of space, time and matter, as well as new ways of conceptualizing the world by creating new categories of thought for governance, identity and intimacy.

Effectively, industrialization created new objects for and new subjects of struggle. Or to use Jordan’s terminology, new practices, points of view and entanglements arose.

So if Jordan vehemently disagrees with Marxists, what new civic identities, relations and regimes have emerged to make their categories obsolete?

There is an adage that circulates within STS: ‘Big Data would not be possible without Big Finance nor Big Law.’

This points to the initial financing that permits platforms like Uber to register considerable losses and continue operations; or how law firms are retained by Big Tech companies to fend off regulators targeting the range of interlocking services that make it harder for users to switch.

If there is merit in looking at ‘the practices that create and sustain the wealth of a society, there is equal merit in focusing on the practices that sustain foundational social inequalities caused by global capitalism.

In short, there may be user bias in Jordan’s practice theory.

Markets both need and fight states. Markets need states to help discipline workers and maintain property rights, but markets also fight states when governance threatens desired rates of profit.

Yet the interplay of law, political economy and shareholder lobbying are at the very edge of Jordan’s method.

Source: London School of Economics