TikTok has superseded Spotify in certain respects, namely the ability to make a song a hit, but it’s Spotify, more than any other platform, which has become synonymous with the experience of listening. Nobody signs up to a video streaming service like Netflix expecting to be able to watch whatever they want – you know that you’re paying for a limited selection. But the premise of Spotify is that you don’t need anything else. The idea of abandoning it might therefore seem tantamount to abandoning music itself.

In the American tech sector, Jack Dorsey and Chris Hughes were far from alone in their enthusiasm. Over the preceding decade, financiers and entrepreneurs from across the industry had steadily come out in favour of UBI and cash transfers as the solution to social ills. On the Left and Right, the growing enthusiasm for cash transfers in the last 10 years signals not just a crisis of the old welfare state, but a crisis of politics as a type of human activity. Even in the tumultuous 2020s, it remains an open question how and when it will end.

This chapter discusses the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) from the vantage point of political economy, based on the following premises: AI systems maximize a single, measurable objective; in society, different individuals have different objectives; AI systems generate winners and losers; society-level assessments of AI require trading off individual gains and losses; AI requires democratic control of algorithms, data, and computational infrastructure, to align algorithm objectives and social welfare.

This book explores the political economy of the search engine industry against the backdrop of the relationship between information and capitalism’s developmental processes. Its critical analysis draws on in-depth discussions of essential issues like how the search engine evolved into a ubiquitous commercial service, its place in a global information business that is restructuring the information industry and our very social lives, who exactly designs and uses search technology, what kinds of workers labor behind the scenes, and the influence of geopolitics.

The modality of data's power lies not in the extraction of value as such, but in the interaction of orders of knowledge with orders of value. This reordering both acts as a motor of further colonial epistemic violence and creates the conditions for a new apparatus of racialized dispossession. Giving examples from migration governance, this article sets out its targets, objects, and operations.

When the camera was invented, we saw distant chunks of the world for the first time with our eyes. GPT systems show us parts of the world so close that they basically are our world, but in a strange, flattened form. As labor and capital conditions inevitably change, their connection to ideology is momentarily on display. GPT-4 was released in March, but OpenAI withheld all technical details as industrial secrets. The window will soon shut for us to keep peering with technical awareness into this tepid void. We should take advantage of it now.

The growth of social media has provided ideal conditions for feelings of anger and frustration to be expressed and shared. Social media have become part of our economic and political system, they do not offer a product, but a platform for everyone’s opinions. This episode discusses how the capitalist system behind social media benefits from feeling resentment.

Recent developments in AI have unsettled expectations about the firmness of the line between human and nonhuman, emotion and intellect, and person and machine. In this talk, the speaker will draw on comparisons between biotechnology and AI to explore how technological change reconfigures our sense of human nature and with what implications for human rights and entitlements.

Rather than simply monetizing personal information, Big Tech firms have gone far beyond the ‘surveillance’ fears of many critical thinkers. Today, however, Big Tech firms face challenges on different fronts: from politicians and policymakers developing new frameworks to curtail their power; and from the internal contradictions and dysfunctions in their own operations. Will markets come back, or is this their end?

Research has shown that Black politicians in the Global North contend with higher instances of abusive language on social media platforms. This study investigates how public interactions engage with the intersectional positionalities of nine Black Canadian politicians. The study collected all the replies to tweets posted by the politicians from 2006 to 2021. Results from the manual analysis showed that 56% of the tweets had a neutral tone, meaning that even if they contained abusive language, they did not directly address the politician. They were also not complimentary.