The internet's unholy marriage to capitalism

Monthly Review

Volumn 62, Issue 10, 2011, Pages 1-30

  McChesney, Robert W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

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EID: 79955446782     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/mr-062-10-2011-03_1     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. For a discussion of this point, see Robert W. McChesney, Communication Revolution (New York: The New Press, 2007), ch. 3.
2. For important recent discussions of the negative implications of the digital revolution, see Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: WW. Norton, 2010);
3. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
4. Wilhelm Ostwald, "Breaking the Boundaries," The Masses (February 1911), 15-16.
5. Email from Sascha Meinrath to Robert W. McChesney, January 6, 2011.
6. Kenneth David Nichols, The Road to Trinity: A Personal Account of How America's Nuclear Policies Were Made (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987), 34-35.
7. See Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010) for a superb discussion of this point and debunking of the other ideological ballast underpinning neoliberal economics.
8. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking, 1995), 180.
9. For a revealing discussion of the 1990s lobbying by the telephone companies, see Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).
10. The information in this paragraph comes from Connecting America: The National Broadcasting Plan (Washington, D.C.: Federal Communications Commission, 2010), 37-38.
11. For OECD data see OECD, Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry, OECD Broadband Portal, http://oecd. org. See also: James Losey and Chiehyu Li, Price of the Pipe: Comparing the Price of Broadband Service Around the Globe (Washington, DC: New America Foundation, 2010).
12. Lynn Sweet "Obama on why he is not for single payer health insurance. New Mexico town hall transcript," Chicago Sun Times, May 14, 2009, http://blogs.suntimes.com. Of course, Obama's statement was partly meant to justify acceding to the demands of the insurance companies, since a truly rational course, he implied, was no longer possible. He was wrong. It would still make more sense today from a health care standpoint to move to a publicly run health care system, but vested interests, which benefit from the present system, stand in the way.
13. Al Gore, "Networking the Future: We Need a National 'Superhighway' for Computer Information," Washington Post, July 15, 1990, B3.
14. Sascha D. Meinrath, James W. Losey, and Victor W. Pickard, "Digital Feudalism: Enclosures and Erasures from Digital Rights Management to the Digital Divide," CommLaw Conspectus, vol. 19, no. 2 (2011).
15. Adam L Penenberg, The Evolution of Amazon," Fast Company (July 2009), 66-74.
16. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity In a Connected Age (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010).
17. Meinrath, Losey and Pickard.
18. Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 173.
19. Chris Anderson, "The Web Is Dead; Long Live the Internet. Who's to Blame: Us," Wired 18 (September 2010): 12227, 164.
20. Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 84-86. Hindman does a superb job of demonstrating the immense capital expenses Google incurs to assure its dominance, and that all but guarantee no other firm can or will challenge it in the search engine market.
21. Jia Lynn Yang, 'Google: A 'Natural Monopoly'?" Fortune, May 10, 2009, http://money.cnn.com
22. Hal R. Varian, Joseph Farrell, and Carl Shapiro, The Economics of Information Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 37, 49, 71-72,
23. Richard Gilbert and Michael L Katz, "An Economists's Guide to US v. Microsoft," Journal of Economic Perspectives 15, no. 2 (2001): 30.
24. Anderson, The Web Is Dead," 126.
25. Google, Inc., "Quarterly Report Form 10-Q," September 30, 2010. http://investor.google.com/documents/20100930-google-100. html.
26. Anderson, "The Web Is Dead," 127; Varian, Farrell, and Shapiro, The Economics of Information Technology, 14.
27. Karl Bode, "AT&T Wants FCC To Free More Spectrum-For Them To Squat On," Broadband DSL Reports, January 14, 2011, http://dslreports.com.
28. André Schiffrin, Words and Money (London: Verso, 2011).
29. See Wu, 249-52.
30. See Bertram Gross, Fnendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (Boston: South End Press, 1980) for a prescient take on the matter.
31. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).
32. See Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture (New York: Penguin, 2004) and Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression (New York: Doubleday, 2005).
33. See Robert W. McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of U.S. Broadcasting, 1928-1935 (New York Oxford University Press, 1993).
34. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 173.
35. See Tarleton Gillespie, Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).
36. Apple's "app store" for the iPhone and iPad is a great example of this model in which the distribution for software (with very limited functionality) is highly controlled and locked to specific devices. Jonathan Zittrain calls this "tethering," although he is more concerned with security and is by no means critical of capitalism. See Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
37. Douglas Rushkoff, The Next Net," January 3, 2011, http:/shareable.net.
38. Steven Levy, "How the Propeller Heads Stole the Electronic Future," New York Times (September 24, 1995), 58.
39. See Robert W McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism (New York: Nation Books, 2010). Most of the discussion of journalism herein draws from this book.
40. The system of professional journalism as it emerged in the United States had certain strengths, but was also flawed for a democratic society, tending to reinforce elite positions on important matters of economics and foreign policy. See McChesney and Nichols, ch. 1.
41. Michael Wolff, The Web Is Dead; Long Live the Internet: Who's to Blame: Them," Wired 18 (September 2010)122-27, 166.
42. Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy, 51-54.
43. This section draws on John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 53-72.
44. James Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its Increase (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1819), 3759, and Lauderdale's Notes on Adam Smith, ed. Chuhei Sugiyama (New York: Routledge, 1996), 140-41.
45. James Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, Lauderdale's Notes on Adam Smith, 141.
46. Lauderdale, An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth, 136-37.
47. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 164.
48. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrifl, 1952). 22.
49. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 27.
50. David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, vol. 1, Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 276-87;
51. George E. Foy, "Public Wealth and Private Riches," Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 3 (1989): 3-10.
52. Jean Baptiste Say, Letters to Thomas Robert Malthus on Political Economy and Stagnation of Commerce (London: G. Harding's Bookshop, Ltd., 1936), 68-75.
53. so. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 4, 6.
54. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 35-36;
55. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (New York: Progress Publishers, no copyright 1975 printing), 180-81 (Marx to Engels, August 24, 1867).
56. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Collected Works (London: Collins, 1968),527-41, 931-40;
57. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 932.
58. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 381.
59. Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1923), 168-70.
60. Carl Menger, Principles of Political Economy (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 110-11. For related views,
61. see Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest (South Holland, Illinois: Libertarian Press, 1959), 127-34. Menger's attempt to resolve the Lauderdale Paradox in a manner consistent with neoclassical economics revolved around the distinction between wealth and welfare. Economics dealt with the former (economic goods involving scarcity) and not the latter (noneconomic goods characterized by abundance). The result however, was to undermine completely any wider conception of wealth in terms of use values.
62. Such issues were to be largely confined to the subdiscipline of "welfare economics" introduced by A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan, 1938), 134-35, 183-84. On the notion of social cost and its relation to the conflict between private riches and public wealth, as raised by thinkers such as Lauderdale and Marx,
63. see K. William Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise (New York: Schocken, 1971), 29-41.
64. Herman Daly, The Return of the Lauderdale Paradox," Ecological Economics 25 (1998): 22.
65. The first application of the Lauderdale Paradox to today's information technology, to our knowledge, is to be found in Mark Sagoff, "Locke Was Right: Nature Has Little Economic Value," Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly 25, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 3-4.
66. Lauderdale, Lauderdale's Notes on Adam Smith, 51
67. Anderson, The Web Is Dead," 164.
68. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), 90, and Essays (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley Press, 1951), 56;
69. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 73-74.
70. "FCCs Copps Fears 'Cable ization of the Internet" January 20, 2011, http://broadcastengineering.com.
71. . Terence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: W W. Norton, 1997).