Rob Urie — Technology and Economic Imperialism

The oft called ‘knowledge’ economy brought into being in the ‘developed’ West in the 1990s is composed of several industries that are broadly related but also quite specific unto themselves– artificial intelligence, telecommunications, finance, information technology and digital commerce- the Internet. More broadly, these can be divided into ‘finance’— Wall Street, insurance and real estate; and ‘technology,’ modes and methods of operational interaction with the world. One branch of these technologies in particular, the algorithmic ‘intelligent’ technology of computing tied together through global telecommunications infrastructure, is widely considered by Western economists to be a second ‘industrial age,’ a group of innovations that revolutionized the way the world ‘works.’ The development and growth of these industries was coincident with the revival of the political economy of neo-liberalism and the return of finance capitalism in its most intrusive and destructive forms. And finance— Wall Street, played a prominent role in inserting these new technologies into global political economy.

Finance and information technology are ‘Cartesian’ capitalism reconstituted in its purest form, the form, function and facilitation of the ‘rational’ interaction of ‘economic man’ with ‘the world’ of capitalist theory. Finance is the ‘fluid’ of capitalism, the Aristotelian ether that unites commerce and suspends it in a body of metaphysical equivalence, the ‘this equals that’ that facilitates the aggregation of claims on ‘the world.’ The ‘intelligence’ of ‘intelligent’ machines is algorithmic, the product of instructions written in mathematical languages to be operationally efficient, the reconstitution of ‘time is money’ into machine action. Not coincidentally, finance and technology are the twin ‘explanations’ offered by capitalist economists for the stupendous fortunes suddenly found in the pockets and bank accounts of a group of actual persons so small it could barely fill an island of modest size. And to be clear, these fortunes are ‘claims’ in the sense they are socially circumscribed rather than ‘possessed,’ aggregations of contracts, representations and rights that depend on social accedence for their ‘value.’

The typical frame of ‘technology’ in Western economics is as method / mode of economic ‘efficiency’ in capitalist production. Opponents of technology are ‘Luddites,’ labor displaced by technology whose blame is ‘misplaced’ because making more from less— economic efficiency, makes ‘the world’ better off. The ‘tradeoff’ offered is that this displaced labor can now buy lower priced goods made possible through ‘technology.’ And if the new found absence of a paycheck hinders those directly displaced from reaping economic benefit then the economic ‘system’ is argued to benefit. Finance, ‘money,’ is the fluid and metric of equivalence here, the object of ‘system’ that renders irrelevant whose pocket it ends up in. The fact of displacement is its own proof, the backward induction that technology found the right target. This theoretical sleight of hand is wholly circular—economic efficiency made possible through technology benefits the economic system, labor displaced by technology is part of this economic system and therefore displaced labor benefits from being displaced....

Counterpoint
Technology and Economic Imperialism
Rob Urie