A Maussian bargain: Primitive accumulation in digital capitalism

Accounting and Management Control

Speaker: Marion Fourcade (University of California)

Room T015

Abstract:

Primitive accumulation in the digital economy—the appropriation of data about people, organizations, and things and their transformation into a form of capital—has often been described, following David Harvey, as a process of “accumulation of dispossession,” a pervasive loss of rights buttressed by predatory practices. Yet this argument does not square well with the fact that enrolment into digital systems is often experienced (and presented by companies) as a much more benign process: signing up for a “free” service, responding to a “friend’s” invitation, or being encouraged to “share” content. In this paper, we rely on sociological and anthropological theory, specifically Marcel Mauss’s classic essay on The Gift, to show how digital firms systematically capitalize on social rules, as well as spontaneous and engineered forms of reciprocity, to build their business and accumulate data assets. We draw on historical material and in-depth interviews with the designers and critics of digital systems to explain the cultural genesis of these “give-to-get” relationships and to analyze the socio-technical channels that structure them in practice.