Political Economy of Digital Life
Sem 1 2026 · Side 1 of 2
100% essay-assessed · no exam
0 · How to Use Thisread first
This subject is graded entirely by critical writing — no exam: an in-class Book Review PLAN (10%, 500w, Wk3–4), a BOOK REVIEW ESSAY (40%, 2000w, mid-sem), and a RESEARCH ESSAY (50%, 2500w, exam period). Hurdles: ≥80% tutorial attendance + submit every piece (a genuine attempt).
The marked skill = take a digital case & explain it as an expression of capitalism's contradictions — then critique it. So this sheet is a concept + citation bank: the toolkit & the theory (Side 1); the theorist bank, debates & the writing engine (Side 2).
1 · The Spine of the SubjectW1 · the diagram
The lecturer returns to one diagram every week: political economy (base/superstructure) → computing revolution → (global) modernity → digitality — mediating both social life (institutions) and personal life (psychology) through technology.
The deep through-line is social time / speed: since the late 1970s "things speed up," and we can feel it but struggle to say why. PE + a temporal/phenomenological method is the toolkit to articulate it.
Three phases: I PE as a way into mediated experience (W1–3) · II historical/sociological/political (W4–7) · III phenomenology of mediation (W8–12).
2 · Political EconomyW1 · the lens
Political economy · the study of how a mode of production (economy), a form of social organisation (value, power) and processes of socialisation (ideology, culture) hang together — plus the question of capacity for action (agency, autonomy).
Vs mainstream economics: neoclassical economics treats the market as a neutral allocation mechanism; PE treats the economy as a structure of social power & class relations. It's the "way in" to digital life.
Tutorial drill — sort any digital phenomenon (algorithms, influencers, AI agents, K-pop, neoliberalism) into the 3-part skeleton: economy · value-and-power · ideology-and-culture.
3 · Marx Basics, As Used HereW2 · cite-ready
Commodity · a thing produced for exchange, not direct use. Commodification · turning more of life (attention, data, social relations) into commodities.
Use it: name what is commodified in your case, and the labour behind it.
3b · Value-Form TheoryW2 · the engine
Use value = utility, tied to concrete labour (the diamond/water paradox). Exchange value = what it fetches, produced by abstract labour (homogeneous social time) — the basis of surplus value.
Surplus value = value labour produces beyond its wage; the source of profit. Marx's footnote the course hangs on: technology "discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature" & lays bare social relations + mental conceptions (the "missing links" the course inserts).
Capital = what capitalists accumulate through the labour–commodity relation (Harvey). Use it in your essay: show your case extracting surplus value or converting use value into exchange value.
4 · Base & SuperstructureW2 · master diagram
| Base | Superstructure |
|---|---|
| means of production (tools, machines, land) | law, media, politics, education |
| relations of production (classes, capital, property) | art, religion, philosophy, ideology |
They shape each other in a "spiral," but the base is generally dominant. Tutorial debate: is digital tech (base) or political power (superstructure) the more decisive force? Commodity fetishism (Marx) / reification (Lukács): human relations appear as relations between things — Debord extends both into the spectacle.
5 · Crisis & ContradictionW2,5 · Harvey
Capitalism convulses through internal contradictions; crises (the GFC) are cyclical (Harvey). The course invites reading the "AI bubble" as a coming crisis.
The deepest contradiction (Marx via Celis Bueno): capital uses a tech revolution to minimise the labour-time in each commodity — while still using labour-time as the measure of value.
5b · Industrial RevolutionsW4 · context
The course dates the stages: 1st (1760, mechanisation/steam) · 2nd (1870, mass production/electricity) · 3rd (1947, computing/automation) · 4th (~2020s, cyber-physical/AI). Financialisation — finance & asset-price dynamics dominating productive activity — runs through the GFC, the dot-com crash & the "AI bubble," central to both Harvey's crisis theory and Varoufakis's cloud capital.
6 · Digital & Immaterial LabourW10 · cite-ready
Digital labour (Fuchs) · organising experience via brain + media + speech to make new products. Affective labour (Hardt & Negri) · labour producing/manipulating affects as an immaterial commodity. "The soul at work" (Berardi) · attention "under siege"; capital takes mind, language & creativity as its primary tools.
The audience commodity (Smythe) · media don't sell content to audiences — they sell audiences (their watching-as-work) to advertisers. The classic PE move that prefigures platform capitalism: user data & attention packaged for sale.
Free labour · the unwaged user-generated content & early open-source work that built Web 2.0 — exploitation "beyond the factory."
7 · Platform & Surveillance CapitalismW4 · platforms
Platform capitalism · the Web-2.0 model — set up a low-threshold platform → users populate it → algorithms read their data → sell third parties personalised advertising. "Data is the new oil"; tends toward monopolisation.
Surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019) · claims human experience as free raw material for hidden extraction, prediction & sale; a "parasitic" logic, a "global architecture of behavioural modification," "a coup from above."
Societies of control (Deleuze) · power that "coerces without prohibitions, through enjoyable incentives" — beyond the disciplinary panopticon.
8 · Data ColonialismW3,5 · the South
Data colonialism (Mejias & Couldry) · extracting data & value from the Global South & Indigenous peoples, reproducing colonial asymmetries — platforms "colonise" everyday life. Datafication · converting everyday behaviour into machine-readable, monetisable data points.
8b · Tech Sovereignty & GeoeconomicsW5 · Diesen
Technological sovereignty · states fight for control of critical layers — chips, OS, software, critical minerals. Chip wars: TSMC (Taiwan, ~93% of advanced fabs), ASML (EUV lithography, NL), US export controls vs China, AUKUS Pillar II, reshoring, China's grip on rare earths/gallium. The "Fourth Industrial Revolution" read as great-power competition — a US–China "new Cold War" re-territorialising the once-"open" internet.
Road not taken: Project Cybersyn (Allende/Beer) — socialist cybernetics vs the neoliberal coup.
9 · Technofeudalism & RentW2,5 · Varoufakis
Technofeudalism (Varoufakis) · capitalism has died, replaced by a feudal-like order of monopolistic digital infrastructure; we become "digital serfs."
Cloud capital & cloudalists · a new species of capital (platforms, algorithms, devices) that modifies behaviour & commands attention; its owners extract value as rent, not profit.
Rent vs profit · profit = producing & selling commodities in competitive markets; rent = controlling access to the digital "fief." The demise of profit (replaced by cloud-rent) is, for Varoufakis, the end of capitalism proper — the course's central provocation.
10 · The Attention EconomyW10 · Celis Bueno
In an info/knowledge economy, human attention becomes a scarce, valuable commodity — psychic raw material transformed into labour that produces surplus value (Celis Bueno; cognitive / post-Fordist capitalism). Premise: "content is infinite but time is limited."
Both clock-time and "cyber-time" subsume human activity under capital; valorisation of subjectivity (Virno, Berardi) — subjectivity itself becomes the territory of value-production.
11 · Spectacle & Spectacle 2.0W10 · Debord
Society of the spectacle (Debord) · "everything directly lived has moved away into representation"; the spectacle manufactures pseudo-needs & "the concrete manufacture of alienation." SI tools: psychogeography, dérive, détournement.
Spectacle 2.0 (Briziarelli & Armano) · the spectator becomes an interactive, self-spectacularising, precarious subject — mirroring Web 2.0 & Harvey's shift to flexible accumulation. Personal life becomes entertainment-as-value-production. Epistemology of the spectacle: a "two-layer" reality — deep alienation/reification covered by a superficial spectacular layer.
The spectacle extends the culture industry (Adorno & Horkheimer), Lukács's reification & Marx's commodity fetishism.
11b · Distraction or Attention?W10 · the frame
Master question of W10: is "distraction" a phenomenon of information overload or of market competition for our time? What is attention worth — to us, vs to the economy? Beller: the attention economy is "a generalized alienation of the spectator from vision."
12 · Speed & AccelerationW9 · the high-speed society
High-speed society / time-pressure paradox (Wajcman; Rosa's three accelerations — technological, of social change, of the pace of life). Paradox: if tech speeds things up, why does time feel scarcer?
Time-space compression (Harvey) · tech telescopes distance — Marx's "annihilation of space by time"; capital must speed circulation & expand globally ("faster = better").
Dromology (Virilio) · the logic of speed; speed-space replaces real space; the military is the vanguard; every invention invents its accident; calls for a cultural slow-down. Timeless time (Castells) · "perennial simultaneity."
Wajcman's twist: speed is a sociotechnical assemblage — devices + social norms co-evolve; the digital-detox reflex is "inadequate" & nostalgically conservative.
12b · Acceleration & RefusalW9 · the edge
Accelerationism (Mackay & Avanessian; CCRU) · the heresy that the radical response to capitalism is to accelerate its decoding tendencies. Hyperstition · "fictions that make themselves real."
Futurity vs the future (Eshun) · future = capitalism's intensified present; futurity = a qualitatively different future (Afro/Sino/Gulf/Indigenous/xeno-futurisms). Refusal cultures: lying flat (躺平) · let it rot (摆烂).
13 · HyperrealityW8 · Baudrillard
Simulacra & simulation · four orders of the sign: reflects → masks → masks the absence of → bears no relation to reality (pure simulacrum). Hyperreality = a systematic excess of reality (information overload), where the model precedes & produces the real — "the murder of the real" ("the Gulf War did not take place").
Database consumption (Azuma) · postmodern culture loses the grand narrative; otaku consume a database of settings/character-elements, recombining simulacra without an original — "matching the logic of the Web." Cases (W8): otaku fandom, AI influencers, Amalia Ulman's staged Instagram performance. Barroso applies Baudrillard to the smartphone: "the virtual thinks for us."
13b · The Phenomenological TurnW8 · Phase III
Phase III asks how digital media filter experience. Entry point: Kant's phenomena vs noumena — the a-priori categories framing any possible experience — re-asked as how platforms frame the phenomenological object of knowledge. Habermas's public sphere migrates from physical space (parks, cinemas) to networked software platforms.
14 · Technology & ModernityW3 · the anthropology
Exteriorisation (Leroi-Gourhan) · technology externalises human faculties — tools extend the body, writing extends the mind ("homo faber"). Enframing / Gestell (Heidegger) · modern technology reduces beings to calculable "standing-reserve" → alienation. Cosmotechnics (Yuk Hui) · no single universal Technology — plural technodiversities rooted in different cosmologies.
Plasticity (Mbembe) · digital tech's power is its graftability onto other cultural matrices; tech is "the mediation par excellence of the living." Analogue vs digital (Hassan) · digital is "magical" (invisible, ungraspable) & severs our analogue relation to nature/labour → alienation as "a relation of relationlessness" (Jaeggi).
15 · Ideology & the Tech OligarchyW6–7
Cyber-libertarianism → neoliberalism (Chenou) · 1990s "internet exceptionalism" & multi-stakeholderism didn't stay libertarian — it was institutionalised as a neoliberal mode of governance.
The Californian ideology · countercultural utopianism fused with free-market libertarianism; mutates into reactionary "tech-libertarian futurism."
Reactionary tech oligarchy (Farkas & Mondon) · tech billionaires' entry into far-right movements, enabled by decades of liberal "post-democracy"; rejects euphemisms ("polarisation," "populism"). W6 profiles Thiel/Musk/Karp; Palantir as its nationalist/Schmittian wing (Taşkale).
16 · Network Society & the CommonsW4 · context
Network society (Castells) · post-1970s structure organised around info networks; "space of flows" > place; the ICT revolution diffused on a trajectory set by neoliberal globalisation.
Digital commons · non-proprietary production (Free Software, GPL, Linux, Wikipedia; "free" = liberty not price); Raymond's cathedral vs bazaar; Lévy's collective intelligence. Tension: the commons vs commercialisation/monopoly ("embrace, extend, extinguish").
Web 1.0 / 2.0 / 3.0 · 1.0 read-only (1960s–90s) → 2.0 the platform economy & UGC (2000s) → 3.0 the AI/LLM turn (2020s), with IP, labour-redundancy, geopolitical & ecological (critical-mineral) stakes. Lovink & Rossiter: build "organized networks" — "the world cries for action, not likes."