TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION, BIG TECHS AND CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM
Name: GIOVANNA BORGES BORTOTTO
Publication date: 18/03/2022
Advisor:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| GUSTAVO MOURA DE CAVALCANTI MELLO | Advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| GUSTAVO MOURA DE CAVALCANTI MELLO | Advisor * |
| PAULO NAKATANI | Internal Examiner * |
Summary: There has historically been a tight relationship between technological development and capitalist accumulation, preceding the First Industrial Revolution, since then resulting in continuous tecno-scientific revolutions. In the present dissertation we aim to investigate the connection between the current dynamics of capital accumulation and a group of technological innovations, such as tech devices, mobile connection, digital platforms, Artificial Intelligence, Information and Communication Technologies, big data and so on. In addition to focusing on the nature, tendencies and determinations of the newest wave of innovation, we shall present the operation of some of the biggest market share holders in this field, the so called big tech companies, more specifically both GAMFA (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon) and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) groups. Having as our baseline the concepts of the Marxist critique of political economy, we aim to identify and comprehend the key impacts of the current tecno-scientific revolution on the productive processes, as on the mercantile circulation and financial landscape, such as the mechanisms of social wealth appropriation. Thus, we demonstrate that despite their unprecedented potential, these technologies result from the process of subsumption of science to capital and are by it conditioned, and that such process must be comprehended as a moment of real subsumption of labour to capital ‒ reacting to the tendencies and contradictions that are inherent to capitalist social reproduction, exacerbated in a context of capital overaccumulation. Therefore, among other subjects, we disclose the exacerbation of social control and domination, the increase of surplus value extraction from the active working population and, contradictorily, the fallback of crescent parcels of living labour in regards to the production process, made redundant as the outcomes of automation breakthrough.
