Anti-Capitalist Meetup: spatial fixes and the contradictions of capitalism
Submitted by annieli on Sun, 05/27/2018 - 2:49pm
The political economy of capitalism is also virtual because it is spatial and temporal.
As those who have followed stuff I’ve written here before, I have more than a passing interest in working-out a viable model of virtual capital. Such a model would allow a dimensional digital policy analysis of intangible assets, whether property rights, social networks, infrastucture networks, or financial capital.
So this is another peek at the literature review with the hope that you’ll find it interesting in terms of a capitalist critique. Apologies in advance for its ‘theoretical’ nature and its continuing visit to the work of David Harvey.
We argue here that the digital spaces formed by technologies such as the Internet are experimental spaces where capital seeks freedom from contemporary limits:
Old strategies of accumulation are re-attempted in new spaces and new strategies are crafted through trial and error in the never-ending quest to surpass or displace the internal contradictions which lead to crisis.
The concept we use to describe this is the digital spatial fix. We use this concept to find new sites of accumulation and crisis formation. This shows that while the fundamentals of the cycle of capital circulation have not varied from Marx’s original analysis, it has found novel methods, appropriate to the contemporary historical context, to attempt to escape its inherent limits.
In what follows we will briefly situate our description of digital spaces as fixes for overaccumulated capital within the literatures of the political economy of communication, geographies of economic crisis, and theorizations of the “network society”.
Then, mirroring Harvey’s description of three spatial fixes, we will describe three experimental digital spatial fixes we see operating in the current political economy:
- the primitive accumulation of time in social media,
- the annihilation of time by space via financial infrastructure, and
- the rise of affect rent in marketplaces for digital commodities.
We conclude by reflecting on the questions these conceptual foundations pose for further research, especially regarding the links between
- these digital spaces,
- the temporality of accumulation, and
- more traditional geographies of crisis.
The goal throughout is not to catalog the potential of digital spaces to act as spatial fixes, but to model a spatial approach to digital media
The Digital Spatial Fix Daniel Greene* and Daniel Joseph, tripleC 13(2): 223–247, 2015 http://www.triple-c.at CC: Creative Commons License, 2015.
The problem remains in trying to disentagle the notion of digital spaces and the temporality of accumulation in the indeterminate and uncertain geographies of crisis in late capitalism. Harvey holds to a kind of “fixity” that for interpretation and explanation requires some dynamic simulation or representations for modeling.
