IS DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE LIBERATORY?

the digital revolution -the shift across many industries to move their products and systems online over the last twenty years- could never end scarcity under capitalism, because obviously capital runs on scarcity. instead it untethered labor from means, massively reduced the cost of production, & siloed their consumers into an unregulated proprietary digital ecosystem that is, functionally, a company town. IE netflix, adobe, uber, mychart, doordash, etc.

i've theorized before that subscription software & gig economy apps are a regressive tax on the working class meant to vacuum up their wealth into the pockets of CEOs in a way their pre-digital services never could. while the digital transition lowered the cost of production, the reality of shareholder interests meant they couldn't lower the cost of service accordingly without losing market value.
(i'm not an economist so forgive me if my language here is rudimentary)

now that they've locked their consumer base into these proprietary ecosystems, they can raise prices indefinitely as the whims of the market demand. they get away with this because they're either "optional luxury goods" or "high quality professional tools," excuses fine-tuned to justify any/all cost increases regardless of actual software improvements. this is how monopolies sell themselves-- essential, irreplaceable, unquestionable.

these services, whether cultural, culinary, or bureaucratic, aren't optional. saying someone doesn't NEED a streaming service is certainly technically true, but how is such a thing meaningfully distinguishable from a public library besides its need to turn a profit? our world is aggressively mediated, yet we treat media literacy like stamp collecting. by contrast, finnicky bureaucratic software requires specialists, further essentializing their services. a free market approach is unconscionable.

the working class makes so little, & the cost of living so high, that attempting to build up savings is wasted effort. even tens of thousands in the bank, far more than i've ever had, can disappear overnight with a minor hospital visit, let alone a real emergency. what's 15 dollars a month for tv shows to talk about with your peers in the face of that? frog in the pot, these companies then turn up the heat, raising prices year over year, inventing new toll roads, extracting every penny they can.

behold a nation of rentiers, owning no piece of culture, unwelcome in cities built for cars, never able to buy a house, rootless, drifting, bound to subscriptions, taxed at every intersection for the burden of not being a stock trader. digital infrastructure under capitalism is the opposite of liberatory: it imprisons us by transforming all human activity into a transaction. no good faith, no solidarity, no generosity. such things violate policy, after all, and that would be bad for consumers :)

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i've been circling around a more abstract implication of our economic reality for months now, but i'm struggling to find a sane way to word it. to start: there's a concept used by minimizers of covid called "deaths pulled from the future." it's the idea that most covid deaths are the elderly & immunocompromised, people who were *already* going to die soon. it's a eugenicist notion obviously, but i think it's illustrative of a sneakily pernicious facet of life under capitalism in the digital age.

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i think often on the future we were promised. the liberation of digital technology ("information wants to be free!"), the freedom of the market leading to a good career and a nice retirement like our grandparents. such promises rest upon the presumption of an unchanging economic practice, which is an impossibility under capitalism. the fine text of the white picket fence promise is "follow the rules and you will have this, provided you're white and were born between 1930 and 1950 or are rich."

how else can you describe the incomprehensible financial gains of parasitic corporations in the last 20 years, particularly during the pandemic, but as *capital* pulled from the future? in disassembling welfare, privatizing healthcare, killing public transit, raising tuition costs, and more else besides, our leaders (both elected and self-appointed) have planted roots in the progression of our lives to sap our futures of all their wealth and promise.

in other words, it's a human sacrifice.

at a certain point you have to acknowledge the eldritch quality of our moment. the religion of america is capitalism, our god is the economy, our diviners the economists, our priests the political establishment. this god demands only profit at all costs, the supremacy of numerical valuation of life over the informal unknowing of organisms. the map has become the territory in full. there is no commons left in bodyspace or ideaspace. the line must go up, and so the working class must bleed.

there's no working with it, no reform, no middle ground, no moderation. capital, too, wants to be free, but it has far more to offer aspiring class-traitors and god-kings than mere information. the profit motive is a leviathan that spreads its influence through the allure of being free from the very toil necessitated by capitalism; a disease selling itself as the cure.

thus: there can be no lasting revolution without striking dead the heart of that vile chthon economy, profit, capitalism.

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