This week’s newsletter is a little unusual. It only has one section, which is devoted to sketching out some possible contours of a left tech policy. In what follows, I take the basic principles of decommodification and democratization and try to come up with a model for how to apply them to our actually existing digital sphere.
What should we do about Google, Facebook, and Amazon? People from across the political spectrum are urgently trying to answer this question. So far, however, relatively few answers have come from the socialist left. At least in the United States, the cutting edge of the platform regulation conversation is dominated by the liberal antitrust community, perhaps best represented by the Open Markets Institute. They have some good ideas, and they’re serious about confronting corporate power. But they come from the Brandeisian reform tradition. Their horizon is a less consolidated capitalism: more competitive markets, more smaller firms, more widely dispersed property ownership.
For those of us with our eye on a different horizon, one beyond capitalism, this approach isn’t particularly satisfying. There are elements of the antitrust toolkit that can be very constructively applied to the task of reducing the power of Big Tech and restoring a degree of democratic control over our digital infrastructures. But the antitrusters want to make markets work better. By contrast, a left tech policy should aim to make markets mediate less of our lives—to make them less central to our survival and flourishing.
This is typically referred to as decommodification, and it’s closely related to another core principle, democratization. Capitalism is driven by continuous accumulation, and continuous accumulation requires the commodification of as many things and activities as possible. Decommodification tries to roll this process back, by taking certain things and activities off the market. This lets us do two things:
The first is to give everybody the resources (material and otherwise) that they need to survive and to flourish—as a matter of right, not as a commodity. People get what they need, not just what they can afford.
The second is to give everybody the power to participate in the decisions that most affect them. When we remove certain spheres of life from the market, we can come up with different ways to determine how the resources associated with them are allocated. In particular, we can come up with ways to make such choices collectively, by turning spaces formerly ruled by the market into forums of political contestation and democratic debate. If maximizing profit and maintaining class power were no longer the main considerations in the organization of our material world, what new sorts of arrangements could a democratic process generate?
These principles offer a useful starting point for thinking about a left tech policy. Still, they’re pretty abstract. What might they look like in practice?
