Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech and Planetary Crisis

An anti-capitalist guide to breaking the power of Big Tech

Big Tech firms dominate the global economy. But what value do they actually produce? In this brilliant survey of global tech economy, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni argue that the role of firms like Amazon and Google, Palantir and Uber, is in the automation of circulation.

By applying digital technologies to processes of market exchange—everything from advertising and shopping, to logistics and financial services—Big Tech aims to subject these activities to the level of control and predictability that capital has secured in industrial production.

But there is a way out of the multiple crises that Big Tech has helped precipitate. If we are to break their grip on the global economy then it’ll take more than just antitrust legislation or reducing individual time online.

By understanding the central role Big Tech plays in contemporary capitalism, Dyer-Witheford and Mularoni argue that what is required instead is a new, ambitious and comprehensive program of democratic collective planning that can move us beyond capitalism. 

Cybernetic Circulation Complex offers not only a compelling analysis of the power of Big Tech and their role in our current global crises, but a roadmap for a new form of life: biocommunism, a digital degrowth that can help us steer between the double boundaries of ecological sustainability and equitable social development.

Nick Dyer-Witheford, a Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, is the author of Cyber-Marx (Chicago: University of Illinois, 1999) and Cyber-Proletariat (London: Pluto Press, 2015). He has written on the video and computer game industry, the uses of the Internet by social movements and theories of technology.

Alessandra Mularoni is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. Her dissertation focuses on the bioethical questions surrounding the prospect of eternal life. She has written for Inscriptions, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Political Economy of Communication. She co-manages the web-based project, “Platforms, Populisms, Pandemics, and Riots” (projectpppr.org).