Lecture Series

Winter Term 2023/24

Time: Tuesday, 6-8 pm

Room: E2.339

Working Group Media Systems and Media Organisation

Department of Media Studies

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Paderborn University

This lecture series presents critical theories and analyses of digital capitalism. The contributions show how we can best theorise digital capitalism critically and what forms of critical practice there are in digital capitalism. The lecture series “Critical Theories and Analyses of Digital Capitalism” aims to contribute to a better understanding of critical theories and the philosophy of practice in the context of digital capitalism.

Facebook and Google exploit our digital labour. In late 2022 and early 2023, Google laid off 12,000 employees, Microsoft 10,000, Twitter more than 10,000, Amazon 18,000, and Facebook 11,000. Algorithms are used by corporations for socially sorting and discriminating against customers who struggle to make ends meet and live in deprived neighbourhoods. Lots of clickwork is conducted by poorly paid women in the Global South. Digital fascism, fake news, post-truth culture and algorithmic politics circulate on capitalist and state-capitalist Internet platforms. Information war and echo chambers polarise the digital public sphere, making a new World War between imperialist powers that compete at the global level for the control of territory, economic power and political as well as ideological hegemony and the nuclear annihilation of humankind and life on Earth more likely. All of this is digital capitalism.

There are also forms of critical practice that grow out of the problems of digital capitalism and seek to solve them. Recently, digital workers assembling iPhones protested against the poor working conditions they faced at Foxconn in Zhengzhou during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, warehouse workers founded the Amazon Labor Union. The non-profit federated Internet platform Mastodon has become a viable digital alternative in the light of users’ discontent with Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. Internet experts and users have co-written the Public Service Media and Public Service Internet Manifesto that demands turning the Internet into a public good and advancing digital democracy. While fascists spread post-truth on social media, the progressive news hour Democracy Now! has since 1996 utilised the non-commercial Internet, Public Service Media, as well as community radio and television stations for broadcasting a high-quality, independent news programme that reaches millions of viewers and questions fake news.

Digital capitalism shapes our lives. Digital capitalism needs to be better understood. We need critical theories of digital capitalism. We need to better understand praxes that challenge digital capitalism. The lecture series highlights the contradiction between (digital) capitalism on the one hand and (digital) praxis on the other in the form of talks, debates, and discussions.