Originally from: https://roarmag.org/essays/digital-ecosocialism-tech-deal/

We can no longer ignore the role of Big Tech in entrenching global inequality. To curtail the forces of digital capitalism, we need an ecosocialist Digital Tech Deal.

In the space of a few years, the debate on how to rein in Big Tech has become mainstream, discussed across the political spectrum. Yet, so far the proposals to regulate largely fail to address the capitalist, imperialist and environmental dimensions of digital power, which together are deepening global inequality and pushing the planet closer to collapse. We urgently need to build a ecosocialist digital ecosystem, but what would that look like and how can we get there?

This essay aims to highlight some of the core elements of a digital socialist agenda — a Digital Tech Deal (DTD) — centered on principles of anti-imperialism, class abolition, reparations and degrowth that can transition us to a 21st century socialist economy. It draws on proposals for transformation as well as existing models that can be scaled up, and seeks to integrate those with other movements pushing for alternatives to capitalism, in particular the degrowth movement. The scale of needed transformation is massive, but we hope this attempt at outlining a socialist Digital Tech Deal provokes further brainstorming and debate over how an egalitarian digital ecosystem would look and the steps we might take to get there.

DIGITAL CAPITALISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF ANTITRUST

Progressive criticisms of the tech sector are often drawn from a mainstream capitalist framework centered around antitrust, human rights and worker well-being. Formulated by elite scholars, journalists, think tanks and policymakers in the Global North, they advance a US-Eurocentric reformist agenda that assumes the continuation of capitalism, Western imperialism and economic growth.

Antitrust reformism is particularly problematic because it assumes the problem of the digital economy is merely the size and “unfair practices” of big companies rather than digital capitalism itself. Antitrust laws were created in the United States to promote competition and restrain the abusive practices of monopolies (then called “trusts”) in the late 19th century. Thanks to the sheer scale and power of contemporary Big Tech, these laws are back on the agenda, with their advocates pointing to how big companies not only undermine consumers, workers and small businesses, but even challenge the foundations of democracy itself.

Antitrust advocates argue that monopolies distort an otherwise ideal capitalist system and that what is needed is a level playing field for everyone to compete. Yet, competition is only good for those with resources to compete with. More than half the global population lives on less than $7.40 per day, and nobody stops to ask how they will “compete” in the “competitive marketplace” envisioned by Western antitrust advocates. This is all the more daunting for low and middle-income countries considering the largely borderless nature of the internet.

At a broader level, as I argued in a previous article, published at ROAR, antitrust advocates ignore the globally unequal division of labor and exchange of goods and services that has been deepened by the digitalization of the global economy. The likes of Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Intel, AMD and many other firms are so big because they own the intellectual property and means of computation that is used across the world. Antitrust thinkers, especially those in the US, end up systematically erasing American empire and the Global South from the picture.

European antitrust initiatives are no better. There, policymakers who huff and puff about the ills of Big Tech are quietly trying to build their own tech giants. The UK aims to produce its own trillion-dollar behemoth. President Emanuel Macron will be pumping €5 billion into tech startups in the hope that France will have at least 25 so-called “unicorns” — companies valued at $1 billion or more — by 2025. Germany is spending €3 billion to become a global AI powerhouse and a world leader (i.e. market colonizer) in digital industrialization. For its part, the Netherlands aims to become a “unicorn nation.” And in 2021, the widely-lauded European Union’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager said that Europe needs to build its own European tech giants. As part of the EU’s digital targets for 2030, Vestager said the EU aims to “double the number of European unicorns from 122 today.”

Instead of opposing Big Tech corporations in principle, European policymakers are opportunists seeking to expand their own portion of the pie.

Other proposed reformist capitalist measures, such as progressive taxation, the development of new technology as a public option, and worker protections still fail to address root causes and core problems. Progressive digital capitalism is better than neoliberalism. But it is nationalist in orientation, cannot prevent digital colonialism, and it retains a commitment to private property, profit, accumulation and growth.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL EMERGENCY AND TECH

Other major blindspots for digital reformists are the twin crises of climate change and ecological destruction that imperil life on Earth.

A growing body of evidence shows that the environmental crises cannot be fixed within a capitalist framework predicated on growth, which is not only increasing energy use and resulting carbon emissions but also putting enormous stress on ecological systems.

UNEP estimates emissions must fall by 7.6 percent every year between 2020 and 2030 to meet the goal of keeping temperature increases under 1.5 degrees. Scholarly assessments estimate the sustainable worldwide material extraction limit at about 50 billion tons of resources a year, yet at present, we are extracting 100 billion tons a year, largely benefiting the rich and Global North.

Degrowth must be implemented in the immediate future. Slight reforms to capitalism touted by progressives will still destroy the environment. Applying the precautioonary principle, we cannot afford to risk a permanent ecological catastrophe. The tech sector is not a bystander here, but now one of the leading drivers of these trends.

According to a recent report, in 2019, digital technologies — defined as telecommunications networks, data centers, terminals (personal devices) and IoT (internet of things) sensors — contributed 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and its energy use has increased by 9 percent per year.

And as high as that may seem, it likely understates the use of energy by the digital sector. A 2022 report found that Big Tech giants are not committed to reducing their full value-chain emissions. Companies like Apple claim to be “carbon-neutral” by 2030, but this “currently includes only direct operations, which account for a microscopic 1.5 percent of its carbon footprint.”

In addition to overheating the planet, mining for minerals used in electronics — such as cobalt, nickel and lithium — in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, Argentina and China is often ecologically destructive.

And then there is the pivotal role of digital companies in supporting other forms of unsustainable extraction. Tech giants help corporations explore and exploit new sources of fossil fuels and digitize industrial agriculture. Digital capitalism’s business model revolves around pushing ads to promote mass-consumption, a key driver of the environmental crisis. Meanwhile many of its billionaire executives have a carbon footprint thousands of times higher than average consumers in the Global North.

Digital reformists assume that Big Tech can be decoupled from carbon emissions and resource-overuse and as a result they focus their attention on each corporation’s particular activities and emissions. Yet the notion of “decoupling” growth from material resource use has been challenged by scholars, who note that resource use tracks tightly to GDP growth across history. Researchers recently found that shifting economic activity to services, including knowledge-intensive industries, has limited potential to reduce global environmental impacts due to the increase in levels of household consumption by service workers.

In sum, the limits to growth changes everything. If capitalism is ecologically unsustainable, then digital policies must accommodate this stark and challenging reality.

DIGITAL SOCIALISM AND ITS BUILDING BLOCKS

In a socialist system, property is held in common. The means of production are directly controlled by the workers themselves through worker coops, and production is for use and need rather than exchange, profit and accumulation. The role of the state is contested among socialists, with some arguing that governance and economic production should be as decentralized as possible, while others argue for a greater degree of state planning.

These same principles, strategies and tactics apply to the digital economy. A system of digital socialism would phase out intellectual property, socialize the means of computation, democratize data and digital intelligence and place the development and maintenance of the digital ecosystem into the hands of communities in the public domain.

Many of the building blocks for a socialist digital economy already exist. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Creative Commons licenses, for example, provide the software and licensing for a socialist mode of production. As James Muldoon notes in Platform Socialism, city projects like DECODE (DEcentralised Citizen-owned Data Ecosystems) provide open source public interest tools for community activities where citizens can access and contribute data, from air pollution levels to online petitions and neighborhood social networks, while retaining control over data shared. Platform coops, such as the Wings food delivery platform in London, provide a prominent workplace model whereby workers organize their labor through open source platforms collectively owned and controlled by the workers themselves. There is also a socialist social media alternative in the Fediverse, a set of social networks that interoperate using shared protocols, that facilitate a decentralization of online social communications.

But these building blocks would need policy change to thrive. Projects like the Fediverse, for example, are not able to integrate with closed systems or compete with the massive concentrated resources of the likes of Facebook. A set of radical policy changes would therefore be needed to force big social media networks to interoperate, decentralize internally, open up their intellectual property (e.g. proprietary software), end forced advertising (advertising people are subjected to in exchange for “free” services), subsidize data hosting so that individuals and communities — not the state or private companies — can own and control the networks and perform content moderation. This would effectively strangle tech giants out of existence.

The socialization of infrastructure would also need to be balanced with robust privacy controls, restrictions on state surveillance and the roll-back of the carceral security state. Currently the state exploits digital technology for the means of coercion, often in partnership with the private sector. Immigrant populations and people on the move are heavily targeted by a mix of cameras, aircraft, motion sensors, drones, video surveillance and biometrics. Records and sensor data are increasingly centralized by the state into fusion centers and real-time crime centers to surveil, predict and control communities. Marginalized and racialized communities and activists are disproportionately targeted by the high-tech surveillance state. These practices should be banned as activists work to take down and abolish these institutions of organized violence.

THE DIGITAL TECH DEAL

Big Tech corporations, intellectual property and private ownership of the means of computation are deeply embedded into the digital society, and cannot be turned off overnight. Thus, to replace digital capitalism with a socialist model, we need a planned transition to digital socialism.

Environmentalists have proposed new “deals” outlining the transition to a green economy. Reformist proposals like the US Green New Deal and European Green Deal operate within a capitalist framework that retains the harms of capitalism, such as terminal growth, imperialism and structural inequality. In contrast, ecosocialist models, such as the Red Nation’s Red Deal, the Cochabamaba Agreement and South Africa’s Climate Justice Charter, offer better alternatives. These proposals acknowledge the limits of growth and incorporate the egalitarian principles need for a just transition to a truly sustainable economy.

However, neither these red nor green deals incorporate plans for the digital ecosystem, despite its central relevance to the modern economy and environmental sustainability. In turn, the digital justice movement has almost entirely ignored degrowth proposals and the need to integrate their assessment of the digital economy into an ecosocialist framework. Environmental justice and digital justice go hand-in-hand, and the two movements must link up to achieve their goals.

To this effect, I propose an ecosocialist Digital Tech Deal which embodies the intersecting values of anti-imperialism, environmental sustainability, social justice for marginalized communities, worker empowerment, democratic control and class abolition. Here are ten principles to guide such a program:

1. Ensure the digital economy falls within social and planetary boundaries

We face a reality that the richest countries in the North have already emitted more of their fair share of the carbon budget — and this is also true of the Big Tech-led digital economy that is disproportionately profiting the richest countries. It is therefore imperative to ensure the digital economy falls within social and planetary boundaries. We would need to establish a scientifically-informed limit on the amount and types of materials that can be used and decisions could be made about which material resources (e.g. biomass, minerals, fossil energy carriers, metal ores) should be devoted to which use (e.g. new buildings, roads, electronics, etc.) in which amounts for which people. Ecological debts could be established which mandate redistributive policies from North to South, rich to poor.

2. Phase out intellectual property

Intellectual property, especially in the form of copyrights and patents, give corporations control over knowledge, culture and the code that determines how apps and services work, allowing them to maximize user engagement, privatize innovation and extract data and rents. Economist Dean Baker estimates that intellectual property rents cost consumers an additional $1 trillion per year compared to what could be obtained on a “free market” without patents or copyright monopolies. Phasing out intellectual property in favor of a commons-based model of sharing knowledge would reduce prices, widen access to and enhance education for all and function as a form of wealth redistribution and reparations to the Global South.

3. Socialize physical infrastructure

Physical infrastructure such as cloud server farms, wireless cell towers, fiber optic networks and transoceanic submarine cables benefit those who own it. There are initiatives for community-run internet service providers and wireless mesh networks which can help place these services into the hands of communities. Some infrastructure, such as submarine cables, could be maintained by an international consortium that builds and maintains it at cost for the public good rather than profit.

4. Replace private investment of production with public subsidies and production.

Dan Hind’s British Digital Cooperative is perhaps the most detailed proposal for how a socialist model of production could work in the present context. Under the plan, “public sector institutions, including local, regional and national government, will provide venues where citizens and more or less cohesive groups can assemble and secure a claim on the political.” Enhanced by open data, transparent algorithms, open-source software and platforms and enacted through democratic participatory planning, such a transformation would facilitate investment, development and maintenance of the digital ecosystem and broader economy.

While Hind envisions rolling this out as a public option within a single country — competing with the private sector — it could instead provide a preliminary basis for the complete socialization of tech. In addition, it could be expanded to include a global justice framework that provides infrastructure as reparations to the Global South, similar to the way climate justice initiatives pressure rich countries to help the Global South replace fossil fuels with green energy.

5. Decentralize the internet

Socialists have long pushed for decentralizing wealth, power and governance into the hands of workers and communities. Projects like FreedomBox offer free and open source software to power inexpensive personal servers that can collectively host and route data for services like email, calendaring, chat apps, social networking and more. Other projects like Solid allow people to host their data in “pods” they control. App providers, social media networks and other services can then access the data on terms acceptable to users, who retain control over their data. These models could be scaled up to help decentralize the internet on a socialist basis.

6. Socialize the platforms

Internet platforms like Uber, Amazon and Facebook centralize ownership and control as private intermediaries that stand between users of their platforms. Projects like the Fediverse and LibreSocial provide a blueprint for interoperability that could potentially extend beyond social networking. Services that cannot simply interoperate could be socialized and operated at cost for the public good rather than for profit and growth.

7. Socialize digital intelligence and data

Data and the digital intelligence derived from it are a major source of economic wealth and power. Socialization of data would instead embed values and practices of privacy, security, transparency and democratic decision-making in how data is collected, stored and used. It could build on models such as Project DECODE in Barcelona and Amsterdam.

8. Ban forced advertising and platform consumerism

Digital advertising pushes a constant stream of corporate propaganda designed to manipulate the public and stimulate consumption. Many “free” services are powered by ads, further stimulating consumerism precisely at the time that it imperils the planet. Platforms like Google Search and Amazon are built to maximize consumption, ignoring ecological limits. Instead of forced advertising, information about products and services could be hosted in directories and accessed on a voluntary basis.

9. Replace military, police, prisons and national security apparatuses with community-driven safety and security services

Digital technology has increased the power of police, military, prisons and intelligence agencies. Some technologies, such as autonomous weapons, should be banned, as they have no practical use beyond violence. Other AI-driven technologies, that arguably have socially beneficial applications, would need to be tightly regulated, taking a conservative approach to limit their presence in society. Activists pushing to curtail mass state surveillance should join hands with those pushing for abolition of police, prison, national security and militarism, in addition to people targeted by those institutions.

10. End the digital divide

The digital divide typically refers to unequal individual access to digital resources like computer devices and data, but it should also encompass the way digital infrastructure, such as cloud server farms and high-tech research facilities, are owned and dominated by wealthy countries and their corporations. As a form of wealth redistribution, capital could be redistributed through taxation and a process of reparations to subsidize personal devices and internet connectivity to the global poor and to provide infrastructure, such as cloud infrastructure and high-tech research facilities to populations that cannot afford them.

HOW TO MAKE DIGITAL SOCIALISM REALITY

Radical changes are needed, but there is wide gap between what must be done and where we are today. Nevertheless, there are some critical steps we can and must take.

First, it is essential to raise awareness, promote education and exchange ideas within and across communities so together we can co-create a new framework for the digital economy. In order to do this, a clear critique of digital capitalism and colonialism is needed.

Such a change will be difficult to bring about if concentrated knowledge production is left intact. Elite universities, media corporations, think tanks, NGOs and Big Tech researchers in the Global North dominate the conversation and set the agenda around fixing capitalism, limiting and constraining the parameters of that conversation. We need steps to strip their power, such as abolishing the university ranking system, democratizing the classroom and terminating funding from corporations, philanthropists and Big Foundations. Initiatives to decolonize education — such as the recent #FeesMustFall student protest movement in South Africa and Endowment Justice Coalition at Yale University — provide examples of the movements that will be needed.

Second, we need to connect digital justice movements with other social, racial and environmental justice movements. Digital rights activists should be working with environmentalists, abolitionists, food justice advocates, feminists and others. Some of this work is already being done — for example, the #NoTechForIce campaign spearheaded by Mijente, a grassroots migrant-led network, is challenging the supply of technology to police immigration in the United States — but more work is required still, especially in relation to the environment.

Third, we need to ramp up direct action and agitation against Big Tech and the US empire. Sometimes it is hard to mobilize support behind seemingly esoteric topics, such as the opening of a cloud center in the Global South (e.g. in Malaysia) or the imposition of Big Tech software into the schools (e.g. in South Africa). This is especially difficult in the South, where people must prioritize access to food, water, shelter, electricity, health care and jobs. However, successful resistance to developments like Facebook’s Free Basics in India and the construction of Amazon’s headquarters on sacred Indigenous land in Cape Town, South Africa show the possibility and potential of civic opposition.

These activist energies could go further and embrace the tactics of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS), which anti-apartheid activists used to target computer corporations selling equipment to the apartheid government in South Africa. Activists could build a #BigTechBDS movement, this time targeting the existence of giant tech corporations. Boycotts could cancel public sector contracts with tech giants and replace them with socialist People’s Tech solutions. Divestment campaigns could force institutions like universities to divest from the worst tech companies. And activists could pressure states to apply targeted sanctions to US, Chinese and other countries’ tech corporations.

Fourth, we must work to build tech worker cooperatives that can be the building blocks for a new digital socialist economy. There is a movement to unionize Big Tech, which can help protect tech workers along the way. But unionizing Big Tech is like unionizing the East India companies, arms manufacturer Raytheon, Goldman Sachs or Shell — it is not social justice and is likely to deliver only mild reforms. Just as South African anti-apartheid activists rejected the Sullivan Principles — a set of rules and reforms for corporate social responsibility that allowed American companies to keep profits flowing from business in apartheid South Africa — and other mild reforms, in favor of strangling the apartheid system, we should aim to abolish Big Tech and the system of digital capitalism altogether. And this will require building alternatives, engaging with tech workers, not to reform the unreformable, but to help work out a just transition for the industry.

Finally, people from all walks of life should work collaboratively with tech professionals to develop the concrete plan that would make up a Digital Tech Deal. This needs to be taken as seriously as current green “deals” for the environment. With a Digital Tech Deal, some workers — such as those in the advertisement industry — would lose their jobs, so there would have to be a just transition for workers in these industries. Workers, scientists, engineers, sociologists, lawyers, educators, activists and the general public could collectively brainstorm how to make such a transition practical.

Today, progressive capitalism is widely seen as the most practical solution to the rise of Big Tech. Yet these same progressives have failed to acknowledge the structural harms of capitalism, US-led tech colonization and the imperative of degrowth. We cannot burn down the walls of our house to keep ourselves warm. The only practical solution is to do what is necessary to prevent us from destroying our one and only home — and this must integrate the digital economy. Digital socialism, made reality by a Digital Tech Deal, offers the best hope within the short time frame we have for drastic change, but will need to be discussed, debated and built. It is my hope that this article might invite readers and others to build collaboratively in this direction.

Michael Kwet

Michael Kwet received his PhD in Sociology from Rhodes University and is a Visiting Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. He is the author of “Digital colonialism: US empire and the new imperialism in the Global South,” host of the Tech Empire podcast, and has been published at VICE News, The Intercept, The New York Times, Al Jazeera and Counterpunch.

Originally Published on https://news.gandi.net/en/2021/12/whats-the-difference-between-wordpress-org-and-wordpress-com/?affiliate=NL_EN_Jan22&pk_campaign=Newsletter_EN_Jan22&pk_kwd=NL_EN_Jan22&pk_source=NL&pk_medium=email&pk_content=news4_wordpress&at_campaign=Newsletter_EN_Jan22&at_send_date=Jan22&at_creation=NL_EN_Jan22&at_link=news4_wordpress&at_medium=email&at_emailtype=retention&at_recipient_list=EN

WordPress is the most used CMS (Content Management System) in the world. It’s free software with the goal of enabling the greatest number of people possible to publish online without having to write code. Simple and accessible, WordPress can help you create any kind of website and manage content published on a website in real time.

What’s the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com, then? Which one should you choose?

What’s the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?

WordPress.org is the website for the free, open source software, which also means it is not owned by a business and that anyone can contribute to it and improve it.

WordPress.com is a business website owned by the US-based Automattic Inc., which sells a website creation product based on WordPress.

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is the website where you can download the free, open source version of WordPress. Still, you’ll need to buy a domain name as well as web hosting in order to be able to install and use this solution.

Remember — a domain name is your website’s address it’s URL, for example, “gandi.net,” while your website’s hosting is “where your site is stored”.Buy your domain name now!

By building your site this way, you get complete access to your website’s files and the ability to modify it without any restriction. That’s also leaves users free to choose the registrar (the business that registers a domain for you, like Gandi) and hosting provider.

That, in turn, enables a user to adjust their choices according to their budget and to shop for the best deal from amongst competitors. On the other hand, the website administrator will be responsible for the technical maintenance of the site, which entails a certain amount of technical know-how.

Want to install WordPress on a Gandi Simple Hosting instance?

WordPress.com

WordPress.com is a website owned by Automattic Inc., a US-based company. The site offers a hosted version of WordPress, with a turnkey solution including hosting and domain name. With this solution, your WordPress installation is already implemented on your website and ready to use, so it doesn’t require any technical handling.

This solution is better adapted for complete website creation novices who want to create a simple website without having to learn much about websites and the internet. It still has certain limits, like the price and plugins that are initially free when you install them but later require payment.

Which should you choose?

Overall, it all depends on your goals in creating a website.

If you want to make a site quickly with little to no technical knowledge, WordPress.com is probably the better option. This offers you the possiblity of a solution that encompasses all the pieces necessary to bring your website online. However, you should be aware that the amount of changes you can make to your website will be limited, and you may not be able to install plugins without having to pay extra. And unfortunately, you won’t be able to measure traffic on your website unless you opt for the premium package.

If you have basic technical knowledge (or you want to learn) about how to buy a domain name, find a hosting provider, and install WordPress (which can be done in a few clicks): we recommend using the free, open source software available at WordPress.org. This will enable you to be flexible in terms of costs, while maintaining your freedom to install or not install additional plugins on your website.Learn more about hosting WordPress on your Gandi Simple Hosting instance!

What’s the relationship between these two entities?

Automattic Inc. operates WordPress.com using the WordPress software and in return, it’s one of the main contributors to the open-source software. At the same time, Automattic comes from WordPress since some of the WordPress software’s founding members moved on to work at Automattic Inc.

WordPress, then, is not a product owned by Automattic or vice versa. Automattic “comes out of WordPress” in a sense, since several of WordPress’s founding members formed the Automattic Inc. company.

In summary, the two entities are distinct even if they are linked to one another: Automattic, by contributing to the development of WordPress software, and WordPress by being the software that Automattic uses for WordPress.com.Check out our guide for launching your website and publishing your first article in 15 minutes or less!

Originally published on https://news.gandi.net/en/2021/12/why-your-websites-url-is-important-for-seo/?affiliate=NL_EN_Jan22&pk_campaign=Newsletter_EN_Jan22&pk_kwd=NL_EN_Jan22&pk_source=NL&pk_medium=email&pk_content=news3_url&at_campaign=Newsletter_EN_Jan22&at_send_date=Jan22&at_creation=NL_EN_Jan22&at_link=news3_url&at_medium=email&at_emailtype=retention&at_recipient_list=EN

by Andrew-Posted on 12.16.2021

A majority — 53% according to some sources — of website traffic now comes from organic search, that is, from search results in Google and other search engines ranked according to calculations using a secretive formula known as the “algorithm.” Furthermore, a whopping 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.

That means most website traffic on the internet is highly dependent on websites’ ranking in search engine results pages. It’s no wonder, then, that businesses in the US alone are spending some $80 billion per year on search engine optimization, or SEO, to make sure they are optimally ranked in search engine results pages.

SEO strategies generally focus on using keywords in the text of webpages at a particular density, “link building” — the process of “building” links from other, relevant websites to your own, content formatting, technical improvements to website load times, and more.

One SEO strategy not to miss, though, is optimizing your website and webpages’ URLs.

Before we dive in to analyzing how to optimize your URL for SEO, we’ll just note that we’ll be referring in this article primarily to Google’s rules and ranking factors. We’re not necessarily supportive of the fact that Google has a virtual monopoly on search, but this is the case, and whatever Google does is very likely to be replicated by its competitors. When it comes to SEO, the top priority is ranking well in Google, although you shouldn’t ignore optimizing for other search engines.

What’s a URL?

If you don’t know what a URL is, it’s an abbreviation for “Uniform Resource Locator.” That’s basically a technical way of saying a web address — that is, the text that you type in to the address bar at the top of your web browser when you want to go to a particular website, or which appears there when you click a link.

Critically, a webpage’s URL also appears in search engine results, so it can be a critical part of your website’s branding, even for traffic coming from search engines.

A URL can be composed of as many as 7 parts:

• The protocol
• A subdomain
• The domain name
• The domain ending
• A path
• A query
• Parameters
• Fragment

https://www.example.tld/home?=321#example

But generally, consists of three:

• The protocol
• The domain name
• The domain ending

And often a fourth:

• A path

We’ll take a look at the impact of each of these four on your website’s SEO.

What impact does the protocol have on SEO?

While there certainly exist other protocols (like ftp, ftps, mailto, and file), the two main options for a website’s protocol are http and https.

What’s the difference between http and https?

The acronym “http” stands for “hypertext transfer protocol” and “https” stands for “hypertext transfer protocol secure.” Don’t worry about what the hypertext transfer protocol is technically speaking. Suffice it to say this protocol is what makes the web possible. But what you should be concerned about is the s for “secure,” in https.

When a URL begins with https, that means that that site or page is protected using a TLS or SSL certificate. By “protected,” that means two things:

1. Authentication
2. Encryption

The first part, authentication, means that the identity of a website you visit that uses https is verified. That means that a third-party service, in the process of creating the TLS or SSL certificate has checked to make sure the person requesting that certificate is who they say they are.

The second part, encryption, means that when data is exchanged on a website using https, that it’s encrypted using public-key encryption. This type of encryption ensures that even if the data exchanged between an end-user and your website is intercepted, that the person intercepting it will not be able to read it — only the end-user and the website will be able to unencrypt the data.

Not only does this help secure sensitive transactions like credit card purchases and account logins, it makes browsing safer and more private by preventing third parties from eavesdropping on or recording your browsing activity, to serve you ads based on your activity, for example.

When using http (with no s), you get none of these advantages.

How does https impact SEO?

In 2014, Google started using https as a ranking signal. That means that using https now contributes to your ranking on Google’s search engine results. Since that time, https adoption has expanded massively. A March 2021 study by Mozilla, the makers of the Firefox browser, found that almost 93% of all websites use https.

Internet users now know that they can trust URLs that start with https and, above all, that they shouldn’t trust URLs that start with just http.

In other words, it’s not so much the case that using https alone will help you rank higher on search engine results pages. It’s more so the case that NOT using https will impact your search engine ranking. Since it’s a ranking factor on its own, not using https will mean your site will be automatically ranked lower, and since users won’t trust your website (and so may not click on your website in search results or stay long on your website if they do), https is essential for your website to rank well.

What impact does the domain ending have on SEO?

Before we talk about the domain name you choose, let’s first talk about the domain ending as a factor for your SEO ranking.

What is a domain ending?

A domain ending, also called a top-level domain (sometimes referred to by the term “extension,” misappropriated from the unrelated “filename extension” naming convention for computer files like .mp3, .docx, .exe, etc.), is the part of a domain name or web address that trails the dot after the name itself. That is, it’s the ‘.com’ in ‘example.com’ and the ‘.net’ in ‘gandi.net.’

Originally, there were only a handful of generic domain endings and then ccTLDs, or country-code top-level domains that used country codes for domain endings.

Today, there are many TLDs, or domain endings, to choose from. There are, in fact, more than 700 options available to choose from. Some of these are also “generic” domain endings, similar to .com in their wide applicability to almost any website.

Others continue the theme of ccTLDs by offering more precise geographical options, like .nyc for New York City, or .taipei for the city of Taipei.

And still more target specific niche areas of interest or industries, like .wine, .baseball, and .travel.

Do keywords in a domain ending improve SEO?

The preponderance of new domain endings includes many that are identical to or contain keywords that you might be targeting in your SEO strategy. For example, if you are a cloud computing company, you might register a .cloud domain name. This a great move for your branding, since it will embed information about your company into your domain name itself in a clean and comprehensible way.

But will it also help you rank on the “cloud” keyword?

Unfortunately, the answer is no. Google is clear that “keywords in a TLD [i.e. domain ending] do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search.” This is bad news if you registered a domain name with one of these new domain endings hoping it would help you rank for a keyword, but it’s good news if you already have a domain name that doesn’t have a domain ending with a keyword, since it means you won’t face competition in your ranking from a “keyword” domain ending that didn’t exist when you bought your domain name.

Does the domain ending impact SEO?

Yes. Specifically, if you purchase a domain name with a country-code TLD, Google will use that to geotarget your website. That means that if your business is in the UK and you get a .uk domain name for your website, your website will rank higher on search results pages in the UK.

Similarly, if your business is based in the US and you have a branch in Canada and a branch in Mexico, in addition to your main domain name, you could also get a .ca domain name and a .mx domain name that correspond to your brand so that these rank higher in Canada and Mexico respectively than, your US website otherwise might.

(One caveat is that while this applies to country-code TLDs, it does not apply to new “geographic” TLDs, like the ones mentioned above (.taipei, .nyc, etc.), which Google considers to be “generic.”)

What impact does your domain have on SEO?

The actual domain that you choose, not including the domain ending, can also have an impact on your website’s search engine ranking.

Remember that Google (and other search engines) design their ranking algorithms to try to filter the most relevant results to a particular search to the top of the results. There are, essentially, two ways that your domain name can help you float to the top then: using keywords and branding.

Using keywords to rank higher is a baseline SEO strategy, and registering a domain name containing keywords is an extension of this strategy to your domain name. The searches this strategy targets will be those related to the products and services you offer, or your location. For example, if you’re a mechanic located in Boston, registering a domain name like bostonmechanic.tld will help you rank for the search “Boston mechanic,” which is probably what most people in Boston search for when they’re looking for a mechanic.

The other approach, branding, imagines a very different kind of search, in which people are searching Google for you specifically, because they’ve heard of your business from your marketing efforts. This is the route most startups use — picking a catchy brand name that will be memorable enough that people will search for it on Google after reading it on a billboard, hearing it in a podcast, or seeing it on a t-shirt.

In that case, you’d register a domain name like brandname.tld, and use a broader marketing strategy to build your brand. It might seem counterintuitive, but this is actually the best way to get a high search engine ranking.

One reason for this is that Google doesn’t like overly strong attempts to game their algorithm to get an advantage. In particular, you should be careful of keyword stuffing.

How does keyword stuffing hurt SEO?

Keyword stuffing in a domain name means registering a domain name composed of several keywords in the hope that your website will rank higher as a result.

In the early days of search engines, this was actually a good way to rank higher, and domain names like ‘custom-nametag-printing-near-me.tld,’ that would try to rank for specific keywords and searches in the domain name itself were common.

It wasn’t long before these types of domain names developed a reputation for hosting less-than-trustworthy websites. As a result, by some combination of intentional discouragement built into the Google algorithm and just the fact that internet users have grown wary of domain names that look like this, “stuffing” your domain name with keywords like this is not just no longer a viable way to improve your SEO, but might actually lower your page ranking.

How does a well branded domain name help SEO?

The reason a strong brand name in a domain name helps with SEO is because internet users are more likely to trust a brand name, and hence more likely to click on a link to a branded domain name, read the information on that page, and share it with others. These are all qualities that Google’s algorithm looks for when determining a webpage’s placement in their search engine results page.

This is why you can choose the best domain name for SEO the same way you would choose the best domain name in general. That is, your domain name should be:

• short
• unique
• memorable
• free of spelling or grammatical errors

The same qualities that make a domain name better for humans make it better for SEO, precisely because so much of the Google (and other search engine) algorithm depends on how people actually respond to your website. When Google tweaks their algorithm, they’re usually trying to make good rules that will rank the best results that are most likely to be what people are looking for on top.

How can you use keywords in a domain name to improve SEO?

All of this doesn’t mean that keywords and a well branded domain name are incompatible. A great example is a local business. If you’re a restaurant located in Oakland, putting “Oakland” in your domain name after your restaurant name is a great way to signal not just to search engines that you’re in Oakland, but also to other people in Oakland.

The search algorithm will recognize that your website is especially relevant for people in Oakland because of the increased traffic to your website from people searching for restaurants like yours in their area.

Likewise, if you offer some kind of common service, like if you’re an auto mechanic, including the keyword “mechanic,” in your domain name, maybe after your name or your shop’s name, can help build trust with people searching for mechanics. And since this is another area where being local can help, including the name of your city or region is not a bad idea either.

In these ways, your location or the service you offer become a part of your brand, since they’re not something that you’re trying to include to try to game the Google algorithm into ranking you higher, you’re using them to better distinguish yourself as someone offering a particular service or operating in a particular area.

How can a URL path impact SEO?

The “path” in a URL is the part after the domain name. This usually indicates the structure your website and where a particular page fits into that structure. Essentially, each path will correspond to a different page on your website.

Users will see the path along with your domain name and domain ending under the link title on the search results page.

That means that you’ll want to think of the path as just as much a part of your branding as your domain name. But unlike your domain name, where focusing on building a strong brand name for your domain name is the best strategy for SEO, keeping your keywords in mind for your URL’s path — i.e. the structure of your website — is paramount.

Ideally, your path should clearly explain the content of your page in 2–5 words, using at least one keyword, especially for paths related to content. A page’s path should also not be too complicated in terms of directories and subdirectories (i.e. slashes and more slashes).

Here are some more tips for how to create a good page path for search engines:

Keep it short

The length of the URL that a search engine will show for your page is limited, so that means you should try to keep it relatively short.

Eliminate words that are purely functional like “a,” “the,” “to,” etc. and try to keep your page’s path concise and to the point.

Keep it focused

Part of keeping your page’s path short is keeping it focused as well, specifically on the topic of the page, which should be a keyword.

If you’re selling paperclips, for example, a good path for the page where customers can buy paperclips from you would either be example.com/shop/paperclips or example.com/buy-paperclips.

If on the other hand, you’re working on an article about unique uses for paperclips, your path could be more like: example.com/unique-paperclip-uses

but you should avoid paths like:

example.com/5-ways-to-use-a-paperclip

Be descriptive

Being concise and focused doesn’t mean that you can’t also be descriptive. One way to be descriptive is if the words you’re using in your path actually correspond to your topic. This might seem basic, but the examples above would all be far superior than URLs like these:

example.com/shop/item_id=99312

example.com/blog/article_id=1791

These lack any kind of description and don’t seem to be related to any topic in particular. They are generic and might even seem spammy to some users.

Constructing an SEO-friendly URL

Due to the high volume of traffic on the internet that goes through search engines these days, you can’t afford to not think about your URL’s impact on your search engine results page rankings.

You may not have realized that a URL is composed of several parts, all of which have an impact on your website’s SEO but in distinct and different ways.

The protocol in your URL is important because https is now all but mandatory for websites to rank well in search engine results. Whether your URL has https in it, though, depends on having an SSL certificate installed on your website.

The domain ending is important because it can help you rank better in certain geographic locations. You might also find a domain name that’s better for your branding in a new domain ending as opposed to going with an old, generic one like .com. Don’t expect a keyword in a domain ending to have an impact on your ranking though.

The domain name itself is important because it can be attractive to people searching for you online. Incorporating certain keywords, like geographic location, or services offered, might help you stand out from the crowd, but this is all part of branding. A well branded domain name is the best for SEO.

Registering a domain name — both domain name and domain ending together — is where you have control over this part of your URL.

Finally, a page’s path should be short, descriptive, and incorporate a keyword. It’s important to keep URL paths focused and relevant. That will help with your website’s branding on the search results page itself and it will help users quickly identify your webpage as the one that will give them what they’re looking for.

On the flip side, overly generic URL paths are uninteresting and nondescript at best, and might actually turn away traffic from your site at worst.

You can control a page’s URL path in whatever content management system or site building tool you use.

Overall, your URL is a critical point of intervention when it comes to optimizing your search engine rankings. Choose yours wisely!

Originally published: COHA (Council on Hemispheric Affairs) by John Perry (November 3, 2021

A few days before the Nicaraguan presidential elections on November 7, Facebook and other social media companies began closing down many of the pages used by Sandinista supporters in their campaign to re-elect President Daniel Ortega. This blatant censorship move was said to be because they had discovered “troll farms” operated by government agencies. But many of the 1,500 accounts closed appear simply to belong to pro-Sandinista journalists or young commentators. TikTok, Twitter and Instagram took similar action, and Google said that it has closed 82 YouTube channels and three blogs in a related operation.

Among those closed were several well-known pro-Sandinista accounts with thousands of followers on Facebook-owned Instagram, including those of the online new sites Barricada, Redvolución and Red de Comunicadores.¹ They even suspended the popular fashion organization Nicaragua Diseña.² When such websites attempted to create new accounts, they were also blocked.

Censorship extended to neutral websites covering the election. For example, Carta Bodan’s daily newsletter on November 2 carried brief descriptions of five opposition candidates.³ When colleagues tried to share this link on their Facebook pages it was rejected. The fact that there are five opponents of Daniel Ortega standing might be an inconvenient truth, of course, given that many of the reports of Facebook’s censorship repeated the U.S. government’s contention that the Nicaraguan elections are a “sham” with no real opponents (despite the fact that two of the parties standing were in government between 1990 and 2007).⁴

Facebook’s head of security, Nathaniel Gleicher, tweeted justifications for its actions, even admitting that “this is a domestic op, with links to multiple gov’t institutions and the FSLN party. We don’t see evidence of foreign actors behind this campaign.” Gleicher failed to respond to accusations that huge numbers of genuine accounts had been disabled.⁵

The Grayzone’s Ben Norton contacted several pro-Sandinista journalists and commentators who had lost their Facebook or Twitter accounts.⁶ These included young Sandinista Ligia Sevilla, who attempted to show her genuine status on her Twitter account, which was immediately suspended.⁷ The same happened to well-known Sandinista activist Daniela Cienfuegos.⁸ Darling Huete, a journalist, had the same experience.⁹ Some, like ElCuervoNica,¹⁰ managed to set up alternative accounts. Effectively many commentators suffered double censorship: blocked because they were falsely accused of being bots, then prevented from proving that the accusations were false when they posted videos of themselves as real people. One journalist who complained to Facebook was simply told that “For security reasons we can’t tell you why your account was removed.”

Exploring the motivations for Facebook’s actions, Norton points out its government connections. For example, Gleicher was director for cybersecurity policy at the National Security Council and previously worked at the Department of Justice. Other senior Facebook executives involved have similar government connections.

International media such as Reuters and the BBC simply took Facebook’s justification at face value–that it had disabled a “cross-government troll operation.”¹¹ Even media such as Aljazeera, often critical of the U.S. government, carried reports on what Facebook had done without adverse comment.¹² Apart from The Grayzone, only the U.K.’s Morning Star appears to have criticized Facebook’s decisions.¹³ Anti-Sandinista news sites, such as Artículo 66, listed the accounts affected, calling them “propaganda” and disseminators of “false news,” even though they are themselves well-established propaganda sources for the opposition.¹⁴ None questioned why this had occurred days before a crucial election, or how it happened that action was coordinated across different social media outlets. The Financial Times reported, without comment, that the Facebook pages were followed by 784,500 users, even though this might have alerted them to the fact that most if not all the pages were genuine.¹⁵

The FT even compared the government’s operation to that of the Russian government’s St. Petersburg troll farm, accused of meddling in two recent U.S. elections.¹⁶ It ignored a crucial difference: that the Nicaraguan accounts closed were engaged in campaigning during their own country’s elections, not interfering in anyone else’s. Even more obviously, having made this comparison, it failed to ask why Facebook is itself interfering in an election campaign, and whether it is doing so at the behest of the U.S. government.

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John Perry is a writer living in Masaya, Nicaragua.

Sources:

1. ↩ Original links: instagram.com; instagram.com; instagram.com
2. ↩ Original link: www.instagram.com
3. ↩ See cartabodan.net
4. ↩ “Blinken accuses Nicaragua’s Ortega of preparing ‘sham election’,” www.reuters.com
5. ↩ See twitter.com
6. ↩ “xxx,” thegrayzone.com
7. ↩ See twitter.com
8. ↩ See twitter.com
9. ↩ See twitter.com
10. ↩ See twitter.com
11. ↩ See “Facebook says it removed troll farm run by Nicaraguan government,” www.reuters.com xxx and “Cómo funcionaba la ‘granja de troles’ desmantelada por Facebook en Nicaragua,” www.bbc.com
12. ↩ “Facebook says it shut down Nicaraguan government-run troll farm,” www.aljazeera.com
13. ↩ “Facebook accused of censoring Sandinista media organisations ahead of Sunday’s election,” morningstaronline.co.uk
14. ↩ “Estas son las cuentas de troles orteguistas,” www.articulo66.com
15. ↩ “Nicaragua’s government accused by Facebook of running social media troll farm,” www.ft.com
16. ↩ “Russian troll farm makes U.S. comeback,” www.ft.com

Republished From: https://mronline.org/2021/11/05/facebook-does-the-u-s-governments-censorship-work-in-nicaraguan-elections/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=facebook-does-the-u-s-governments-censorship-work-in-nicaraguan-elections&mc_cid=38e9366787&mc_eid=e8349bf020

As the digitization of life intensifies in the era of lockdowns, it is urgent to think about how the “Digital Revolution” is shaping a new economic order that extends the destructive hold of industrial capitalism over nature and society. Two recent works discussed here by economist Hélène Tordjman help us move forward on this path.

Hélène Tordjman

The digitization of economic and social activities is a fundamental movement, which affects all sectors and takes several forms: coordination tasks, even decisions, are entrusted to algorithms; at all stages of production, machines are interconnected by the Internet of Things; finally, data becomes an important raw material, provided by consumer-citizens as soon as they are on the Internet, social networks, or use “connected objects”. This data feeds the artificial intelligence disseminated everywhere, and opens a new field for the valuation of capital. In particular, they allow GAFAM to control the advertising markets, and to invent new commercial services based on an increasingly intimate knowledge of our actions, our preferences and even our emotions.

Two recent books offer interpretations of these developments. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, sociologist Shoshana Zuboff analyzes how Google, Facebook, and the like have succeeded in turning the traces each of us leaves on our way through cyberspace into hard cash. She sees the advent of a “rogue capitalism” based on the appropriation of our private data, and warns of the dangers of such appropriation. The economist Cédric Durand interprets these changes within a Marxist framework. He points out in particular two phenomena which would presage a return to a certain form of feudalism, a “feudal regression”: the dismantling of the wage system and the replacement of contractual relations of subordination by relations of dependence; and the growing share of rents in corporate profits1.

While these two authors each bring to light indisputable facts, their interpretations of them do not seem entirely convincing, for the same reason: a lack of analysis of the technical phenomenon. Here I mean technique in the sense of Jacques Ellul, the domination of a mode of action geared towards the search for maximum efficiency in all things2. More precisely, “Technique is the set of absolutely most effective means at a given time. This makes it possible to take down the Technique of the machine, because there are indeed many other techniques than those which relate to the machines (for example the sports techniques) 3 “.

In this sense, technique also encompasses modes of organization, certain areas of law, and what Ellul calls “human techniques”, psychology, advertising, propaganda, aimed at social efficiency. So everything that comes under social engineering belongs to the technical realm. This global perspective on the technical phenomenon resonates with Max Weber’s vision of capitalism seen as a great process of rationalization and the domination of a rational mode of action in the end, emblematic of the engineering spirit. If we adopt this point of view, contemporary developments do not signify a change of regime, but a deepening of industrial capitalism and its extension to new areas, more and more calculation and control, a desire to control nature and the ever-expanding society. ”

THE IDEOLOGY OF SILICON VALLEY

In the first chapter of his book, Cédric Durand traces the genesis of the “Silicon Valley consensus”. This consensus was formed in the 1990s, drawing both on the Californian libertarian ideology of the 1960s and 1970s, and that of neoliberalism, giving primacy to the individual and his freedom to conduct business. Thus, the beginnings of the Internet offered a glimpse of a more “horizontal” world, where everyone’s knowledge would be accessible to everyone, where individuals would emancipate themselves from the tutelage of the state and large companies. The Internet would allow decentralized economic and social organization and free exchanges, a utopia still present in free software circles. However, it was necessary to become disillusioned fairly quickly. By the mid-1990s, under President Bill Clinton, the financial prospects for new information and communication technologies became very attractive. Capital is pouring in, thousands of start-ups are created, this is the boom of the “new economy”. Several think tanks and foundations then play a major role in the dissemination of this digital entrepreneurial spirit, including the Progress and Freedom Foundation, “a key player in the crystallization of a right-wing ideology associated with the digital revolution4”. In 1994, this foundation published an important text, A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, which proclaimed the end of the pre-eminence of material wealth in favour of the immaterial wealth that is knowledge. Thanks to the Internet, a new territory is opening up, still without rules or laws, which reactivates the American myth of the Frontier, of a virgin space to be conquered. Wired magazine, created in 1993 in San Francisco, also conveys this right-wing libertarian ideology called libertarianism.

This new area of ​​freedom, cyberspace, must remain free, without the intervention of a federal state which is still prone to bureaucracy. For example, we can read in the Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age that “if there is an industrial policy for this new knowledge age, it must focus on removing the barriers that hinder competition and promote deregulation massive telecommunications and IT sector. The advent of cyberspace means the death of all centralized organizations and bureaucracy. Cyberspace is America’s last frontier […] America, after all, remains the land of individual freedom, and that freedom extends to cyberspace ”5. The reference to the process of creative destruction popularized by Joseph A. Schumpeter is very often present, as is that to Ayn ​​Rand, a writer singing the praises of freedom and competition, the only one capable of rewarding “creative spirits” and of punishing. the “assisted6”.

Besides the glorification of individualism and competition, the other pillar of the ideology of Silicon Valley is the sacralization of technique, the belief that a more satisfactory social organization will result from scientific and technical progress, in particular from artificial intelligence. This makes it possible to automate a growing number of actions and decisions, making the economic and social system calculable and predictable, like a large machine running smoothly. This representation is not new, but the benchmark machine today is no longer mechanical but cybernetic. Alain Supiot perfectly shed light on this shift from government to that of “governance by numbers”: “the governing machine is no longer designed on the model of the clock but on that of the computer. Acephalous machine where power is no longer localizable and where regulation replaces regulation and governance, government, […], which is supposed to regulate itself like a biological organism or a computer7 “

For Shoshana Zuboff, the main source of what she calls “the utopia of certainty”, this idea that social progress requires a reduction in uncertainty and surprises, is to be found in the work of BF Skinner and his “radical behaviourism”. By going fast, human beings are not much different from pigeons or rats. They overestimate their free will and underestimate the evolutionary determinants and environmental stimuli that make them act. An efficient organization of society can thus be achieved by a good structure of these stimuli, which behavioral economics has more recently developed under the name of nudge8. More fundamentally, in the age of surveillance, a large number of new technologies can be used to build an efficient society: artificial intelligence interpreting people’s behavioral data, sensors of all kinds (including facial recognition) , generalized tracing (as we can observe it in the Chinese system of social credit9)…, all technologies of social control.

In this vision of society, which Zuboff describes as “instrumental”, “social phenomena are only aggregations of billions of small transactions between individuals” (p. 572), and it is a question of “creating a nervous system. for humanity ”(p. 568). She quotes here one of the gurus of this movement, Alex Pentland, of the MIT MediaLab, for whom the digitization of all social relations, the extension of this “ubiquitous computing” makes it possible to approach this ideal of control. One can find roots of such a hyper-individualistic and technical perspective on the social as early as the 19th century, in particular with Jeremy Bentham, champion of social engineering. In other words, and as Alain Supiot reminds us, this desire for control is not new. However, the technological surge of recent decades has provided it with tools of unparalleled power. It is furthermore promoted by an ideology alongside which both Shoshana Zuboff and Cédric Durand have surprisingly passed, that of transhumanism. The latter, which aims to “increase” human and social performance through science and technology, was also born in Silicon Valley at the end of the 1980s, and is an integral part of the “consensus”. The utopia of a self-regulated society thanks to technosciences appears as such in a report by the National Science Foundation from 2002, which describes how the convergence of new sciences such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, information and cognitive sciences (the “NBIC convergence”) can found a “new renaissance10”, where “technology is a real alternative to politics11”. One of the most recent manifestations of this scientific and cybernetic social utopia is that of the Great Reset, the “reset” of the world economy following the crisis caused by the coronavirus, proposed by the Davos Economic Forum.

VALUE CREATION IN THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

“If it’s free, then you are the product.” This is how the business model of digital platforms was summed up at the start of their expansion. Shoshana Zuboff shows that it is not. We are not the product, but the raw material, the source of the valuable data from which these platforms make their products. She sheds light on the existence of what she calls a “behavioural surplus” made up of all the data we leave behind when we go online. Thanks to the increasingly sophisticated algorithms used by GAFAM, this data is interpreted to predict our behaviour, which in turn allows advertisers to target us in the most personalized way possible. “In 2016, 89% of parent company Alphabet’s revenue came from Google’s targeted advertising campaigns.” In the same year, Google and Facebook “together assumed nearly 90% of the growth in advertising spending12”.

Advertisers aren’t the only customers, these “markets for future behaviour” are of interest to many other industries. Hal Varian, author of popular microeconomics textbooks and senior economist at Google, sees it early on: he “addresses the example of ‘vehicle control systems’ which he recognizes as paradigmatic. When a motorist no longer pays the monthly payments on his car loan, it is much easier today to order the vehicle’s control system to block the engine and send the contact details of the car in order to make recovery possible ‘. Insurance companies, he notes, can also rely on these systems to judge a driver’s caution. ”13 S. Zuboff’s book is very rich and lists dozens of examples of how Google and Co are developing strategies to collect an increasing amount of personal data, aided in this by advances in nanotechnology and technology. artificial intelligence. Facial recognition software, for example, makes it possible to analyse the emotions of those who receive the advertisements, in order to adjust the latter even more finely. Autonomous cars, and connected objects more generally, are real data traps. With the launch of the Pokemon Go game in 2016, thousands of children and so-called adults were sent to search for these conveniently hidden virtual creatures at McDonald’s or any other retailer willing to pay to welcome them. Self-contained vacuums map the plans of the homes where they operate. Wearables, connected objects that you wear to measure the number of steps you take or your heart rate, connected mattresses (yes, it does exist) collect more and more intimate data, to such an extent that after The Internet of Things appears the Internet of Bodies… These mounds of data allow us to train algorithms, which therefore become more and more powerful in tracking our lives and collecting new data , in a spiral with no other end than that which the law could put there.

Zuboff insists precisely on the “psychic numbness” which makes us accept such a loss of autonomy and free will. Nevertheless, as C. Durand points out, his perspective is very individualistic, centered on the dispossession of the consumer by ill-intentioned capitalists. She advocates a return of governments in these matters, as if the state were a guarantee. The Marxist perspective of C. Durand makes him embrace the phenomenon in a more global way, by analyzing the global value chains from the beginning to the end of production, not in its only last stage of consumption, and not only those of GAFAM.

The concept of a global value chain captures the process of producing a good through the technical, geographic and fiscal fragmentation implemented by large firms in the globalized world that is ours, a fragmentation greatly helped by the digitization of activities and the remote coordination that it allows. It makes it possible to identify the stages of production that generate the most value. Various studies of these value chains show that today, value is essentially created upstream, when the product is designed, or right downstream, when it is sold. Manufacturing is no longer a real source of value, which is why it is generally outsourced to countries in the South with low labor costs and reduced social and environmental legislation. Apple, for example, is a firm without a factory, all manufacturing is subcontracted. The design and sale are enhanced by intellectual property rights, patents, designs and models, algorithms and databases, brands. “The concentration of value at the extremes of the chain is the expression of a process of intellectual monopolization at the end of which economic power is concentrated in a few strategic sites14”. These strategic sites are those where the most data is extracted and analyzed by manufacturers to improve “the user experience, design targeted advertising or sell personalized services15”. Data is now a fundamental raw material in the process of capital appreciation, and its exploitation gives rise to different types of rents.

Cédric Durand distinguishes four (chapter three). The first derives from the monopolization of knowledge deriving from intellectual property rights. It should be noted that the intellectual property regime has tightened considerably since 1980 and the beginnings of neoliberalism, and extends to scientific information in all its diversity: software and algorithms, databases, but also to the genetic information of living things, from microorganisms to humans, including animals and plants. A growing number of “intangible” things can now be appropriated. The second is a “natural monopoly” rent, in situations where it is more economical for a single firm to produce a good or service rather than several competing firms. This is the case with rail networks, but also with most network industries, such as the telephone industry. It is based among other things on “network complementarities”: Apple does not sell only iPhones, but all the products of the “Apple ecosystem”, operating system, applications, iPods and other tablets, all compatible with each other, and incompatible with competitors’ products. The third type of annuity is the “intangible differential annuity”, which arises from the difference in returns to scale between tangible and intangible assets. The latter being essentially knowledge, know-how and information, they are reproducible at a marginal cost which tends towards zero, which is not the case with tangible assets. Finally, C. Durand defines a “dynamic innovation rent”. The large firms that control global value chains organize the integration of productive processes. “Information accumulates in very specific places where the integration functions are concentrated.” These firms “centralize the data. However, these data are an essential raw material for modern research and development processes: thanks to them, it is possible to identify weaknesses, identify sources of improvement, virtually test innovative solutions16 “. Who controls this data has an advantage in the frenzied technological competition between big companies and big powers. In addition, the control of the material infrastructures necessary for the circulation and storage of data (submarine cables, electromagnetic frequencies, 4G and soon 5G antennas, data centers, cloud, etc.) confers an absolutely strategic position.

The digital economy therefore does not cover only the digital services offered by the major platforms. It is the entire productive system that is gradually digitized, a process that generates a change in the organization of value chains (that is to say in the international division of labor) and therefore in the places where value is created and appropriate.

SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, TECHNO-FEODALISM, OR DEEPENING OF TECHNOSCIENTIFIC CAPITALISM?

With the extension of surveillance, capitalism is crossing a new threshold. As Zuboff writes, “Industrial capitalism has followed its own logic of ‘shock and amazement’, seizing nature and conquering it in the name of the interests of capital; what surveillance capitalism now has its sights on is human nature ”17. All the digital devices aimed at extracting our personal data to better predict and guide our behavior form a ubiquitous infrastructure in which we are all caught, an infrastructure that Zuboff calls Big Other. This impersonal power mirrors our behaviors from another abstract point of view, to the same place as the Skinnerian experimenter guiding his rats through a maze with the right stimuli. And this in an essentially advertising perspective, as in the game of Pokemon Go.

However, publicity and propaganda in the service of social engineering aimed at controlling the masses have existed for more than a century. Their means were different, more artisanal, and have certainly been revolutionized by digital technology, but there is no radical novelty here, it seems to me. Zuboff sees the origin of surveillance in the desire of a few “rogue capitalists” to enrich themselves at our expense, but thinks that other, more respectful uses of digital technology were possible, and that States would be able to encourage them. by limiting the power of GAFAM. In other words, it is not the digitization of all human activities that would be bad, but the use that is made of it.

The belief in the neutrality of the technique is also shared by Cédric Durand18. The place of technique is a blind spot in Marxist approaches, all centered on what happens at the level of the appropriation of production, and not of its precise technical forms. This belief is at the heart of technical ideology and legitimizes most technological innovations. The atom promised inexhaustible energy, the bomb was only an unfortunate development. Biotechnology will produce new plants and new drugs, improving human health and solving the problem of world hunger, while experiments with genetically modified babies are the work of rogue scientists. Likewise, facial recognition is of great help in the fight against crime, and does not have to be used to hunt down honest citizens. These commonplaces testify to a lack of understanding of the technical phenomenon. As Jacques Ellul analyzes it forcefully, modern technique is characterized by its insecurity: it forms a system, a whole, and it is impossible to circumscribe certain parts to separate them from the others. On the other hand, its dynamic is one of blind self-increase, of a subjectless process developing in response to the questions it asks itself. Finally, it tends to be autonomous, that is to say, closed to any moral questioning, deploying itself in the sole dimension of the search for maximum efficiency. This autonomy is of course not complete, the entanglement of power games, ideologies and institutional funding priorities directing the technological paths that will ultimately prevail19.

Thus, the digitization of society and the economy is producing an increasing amount of data. What are they going to be used for? New algorithms performing new functions are developed and generate new uses. As the computing power continues to grow, infrastructure must be developed: from 3G to 4G, 5G, and soon 6G… This exponential volume of data makes it possible to “train” algorithms, which become more efficient in applications. more and more extensive, without ever questioning the order of meaning slowing this dynamic, and digitization continues. But this is not specific to the digital economy, as Zuboff and Durand write. It has been like this from the earliest days of the industrial era, until today’s NBIC convergence. “Anything technical, without distinction of good or bad, is necessarily used when you have it in your hands. This is the major law of our time20 ”. Not seeing this leads, it seems to me, the two authors to identify a change of regime where there is continuity and deepening of an already existing dynamic. Moreover, it is because technique is not neutral that it so disrupts our lives: it brings to light with it practices and social relations that are inextricably linked to it. Developments in the latter would be different if biotechnologies had developed on a large scale before information and communication technologies. The horizon would be Brave New World and Gattaca rather than 1984. But in both cases, calculation, predictability and control, the historical necessity of industrial capitalism.

Undoubtedly because of his Marxist perspective, Cédric Durand gives a great place in his developments to the transformations of work, while Shoshana Zuboff sees the human being primarily as a consumer. Following other authors, such as Alain Supiot, he sheds light on the changes brought about by digitization in labor relations, in particular in the platform economy, what is called “uberization”. The workers on these platforms are no longer bound to their employer by an employment contract but by subcontracting relationships. They are legally independent (therefore assume the risks associated with their activity), but must donate part of their earnings to the platform that allows them to work. Thus, from subordination, the working relationship shifts to dependence. “In the case of Uber drivers, this leads to a paradoxical situation, where the aspiration to autonomy comes up against the extremely strong hold of the platform on the activity: real-time control of the course of the race, submission the evaluation of passengers, opacity in setting prices, prohibition on taking customer details, incentive bonuses aimed at building driver loyalty or increasing the offer in certain areas, penalties that can go as far as deactivating the account, etc. 21 ”. The asymmetry of the working relationship is still there, but it has changed in nature: “the platforms are like fiefdoms”, and “the subjects are attached to the digital soil”. This is one of C. Durand’s major arguments for identifying “feudal regression”.

The other main argument put forward for qualifying the contemporary regime as techno-feudalism concerns the nature of profits. As mentioned, due to the evolution of global value chains, the share of rents in corporate profits is steadily increasing. In a Marxist view based on labor value, corporate profit results from the extraction of surplus value in the production process, part of the work, the “surplus labor”, not being remunerated. This, according to Marx, is the heart of the mechanism for the valuation of capital in the capitalist mode of production. Rent, on the contrary, produces value without production. It arises from the ownership of capital, material and / or intellectual, and does not find its origin in manufacturing work. Taking this perspective, it is not surprising that the author interprets the growing preeminence of rents over productive profits as a sign of a return to a form of feudalism.

However, if we move the point of view, this interpretation can be debated. Since the beginning of the 1980s and the advent of a capitalism regime described as financialized by the authors of the School of Regulation22, financial profits, which have the nature of a rent, have become more important than profits. productive, even for non-financial firms. To the four major types of annuity identified by Cédric Durand, we should therefore add the category of financial annuities, the overall value of which is much greater. However, these rents generated by the ownership of capital do not signify a return to feudalism, but rather an increase in the power of the owners of capital to the detriment of the workers. In other words, they testify to a deepening of capitalism: a change in the regime of accumulation but not of the mode of production.

Finally, against the thesis of a return to feudalism, and besides the fact that the idea of ​​a “return” goes against a temporal vision recognizing irreversibilities, let us recall three of its linked features. The first is that feudal societies were societies of orders, of castes, where the positions of human beings were fixed by the laws of their birth. As Louis Dumont has shown, these were holistic societies: social relations were codified by statutes and traditions, crossed by multiple memberships of various communities (of orders, religious, profession), where the an individual in the modern sense of a subject acting “freely” did not exist as such23. The second concerns the motive of human action. It is only with the advent of capitalism that rational action in the end comes to dominate, and with a very narrowly defined end: monetary profit. The pursuit of material interest was previously considered to be unreliable, feudal societies valued the pursuit of beauty and glory on the battlefield, certainly not the pursuit of profit. Finally, the third fact refers to the place occupied by technique. The definition given by Jacques Ellul, as a principle of maximum social efficiency, allows us to broaden the perspective and understand how the emergence of individualism and the social atomization that followed were conditions for development. of modern technology. Regarding the Industrial Revolution, he writes: “There is no freedom of groups, but only of the isolated individual. […] This atomization gives society the greatest possible plasticity. And this is also, from the positive point of view, a decisive condition of the technique: it is in fact the rupture of social groups that will allow the enormous displacements of men at the beginning of the 19th century which ensure the human concentration required by modern technique25 ”. This atomization has continued to deepen, resulting in what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls a “liquid society”. Such fluidity is both permissive and created by technological innovation that constantly upsets the conditions of existence of human beings. This perpetual movement is contrary to the stability of orderly societies like European feudalism.

Thus, an Ellulien look at the technical phenomenon rather leads to register the digital upheaval in a longer dynamic of continuous technical acceleration since the end of the 18th century, the ultimate change of contemporary capitalism. However, whatever the differences in interpretation of current phenomena, the works of Zuboff and Durant are very rich and provide essential reflection for understanding the evolutions of contemporary capitalism.

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Source:https://www.terrestres.org/2021/05/17/economie-numerique-la-mue-du-capitalisme-contemporain/