THE OWNERS OF THE VIRTUAL LANDS

Image: Yusuf Akın Gülsayın

***

“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

***

When I was preparing for my flight to Edinburgh in September 2021, I felt bleak towards my future in this brand-new city. My booking on Airbnb for the house I would be staying at during my mandatory house quarantine spanned only 11 days, and I was still searching for long-term accommodation every single day. But as Edinburgh, just like many other cities, was (and still is) in the middle of a great housing crisis, this was far from being a uniquely personal experience. The lack of housing for students and newcomers in the city was so unmanageable that the Scottish government had to step up to ensure some regulations were put in place for the main actors behind this artificial conjuncture, for which all the fingers pointed at Airbnb as the primary culprit. The question is how can a mere website disrupt the market without owning a single house? The disentanglement of the answers starts with the word ‘platform’.

According to Srnicek, platforms are ‘the digital infrastructures’ that mediate the connection between multiple stakeholders, such as ‘customers, advertisers, service providers’, or even inanimate objects (Srnicek 2016, p. 47). In order to enable these interactions, platforms afford the means of connection between these groups, instead of establishing their own market space (Srnicek, 2016). In the case of Airbnb, by only providing a common space to connect renters with owners, they hold the access to 5,6M+ accommodations around the world, far bigger than any single landlord. However, being a landlord in this new age of capitalism cannot be solely associated with the image of estate ownership.

In 2011, Sony and George Holtz had a dispute over the ownership of a PlayStation 3 unit, which was bought and ‘hacked’ by Holtz. Although he put forth that he held the means of ownership over the game console that he has bought, Sony’s claim was that he only owned the physical copy of the console itself, while PlayStation as a platform was still under the trademark of Sony. Similarly, Apple has been implementing more and more security measures with each generation of iPhone in order to prevent its users from getting their phones fixed by a merchant other than Apple when it’s broken; meanwhile, ‘the right to repair’ their own phones has been pushed by users for years now. These examples can be extended to software monopolies like Adobe, which have changed their business model from software licensing to cloud and subscription-based ones, or to Uber who provides access to a large network of personal transportation whilst owning none itself. “One reason for Uber’s rapid growth”, writes Nick Srnicek, “is that it does not need to build new factories – it just needs to rent more servers.” (2016, p. 49).

***

The whole infrastructure and algorithms created through human labour are hidden behind user interfaces, similar to colonial efforts to conceal the history of exploited workers on the product.

***

What these platforms have in common is that they all are commodifying the means of access to their services, rather than giving out ownership of the service they are providing to the purchaser itself (Sadowski, 2020). By gatekeeping the ownership, these platforms ‘diminish the sovereignty that comes with property’ (Kostakis & Bauwens, p. 27), and lead to what is called ‘rentier capitalism’ (2020) by Jathan Sadowski. Very similar to the relationship between a landlord and a rentier, we waive our right to own or possess something through the acceptance of this forced confinement brought by license agreements and subscription-based services. Furthermore, in this new form of capitalism, not only the temporary access to the service itself becomes the product, but also the very data that is produced by the users of the platform is converted into something to be extracted, just like a natural source (Couldry & Mejias, 2019). Here, the use of the term ‘natural’ resource is intentional, for it is necessary to store and process the information before turning that raw material into ‘data’. Although Hardt and Negri (2000, p.292) defined the production of these ‘immaterial goods’ such as services or information as ‘immaterial labour’, the very materialised human effort lying behind the process is not to be overseen. The whole infrastructure and algorithms created through human labour are hidden behind user interfaces, similar to colonial efforts to conceal the history of exploited workers on the product.

Yet this brings us to another commonality with landlordship undertaken by those platforms. Through reserving the access to the stored data that they do not create, platforms are ‘reaping what they have never sowed’, as put by Adam Smith to define the landlords (1977, p. 76). Yet, via this privatization of access and the data as the new landlords, capitalism finds itself on the verge of a deadlock of overaccumulation again. Through dispossessing users of their ‘own’ products or data by binding -but never fully read- license agreements, platforms are in the pursuit of a great hoarding that is called ‘big data’, which can be summarized by words of Harvey (2003) as an ‘overaccumulation by dispossession’ (Thatcher et al., 2016). The historical answer to this quagmire has always been the displacement of the capital, as suggested by Castree (2003). But now that the capital is transpositioning itself into dematerialized’ virtual lands, it is of great question the next possible radius of action when the overaccumulation yet again begins to restrict expansion. Two possible answers might be the pursued behind the future promised by blockchain and web3 are bringing (as lately seen with the emergence of the new NFT market), or perhaps Zuckerberg’s dystrophic fantasy world of Metaverse. Till then, as the citizens of the internet, we need to fight back to regain the right of ownership, before the doors leading us to the outside sue us all.

REFERENCES

Airbnb. (2021, November 23). About us. Airbnb Newsroom. https://news.airbnb.com/about-us/

BBC News. (2011, April 12). Sony and Hotz settle hacking case. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13047725

BBC News. (2021, November 23). New licensing laws for short term lets in Scotland. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ukscotland-scotland-politics-59393508

Castree, N. (2003). Commodifying what nature?. Progress in human geography, 27(3), 273-297.

Clements, B. C. (2021, September 27). First-time buyers struggle in Scotland’s ‘frantic’ housing market. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-58684351

Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). Data colonialism: Rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject. Television & New Media, 20(4), 336-349.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Harvard University Press.

Harvey, D. (2005). The new imperialism. oup Oxford.

Smith, A. (1977). An Inquity into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth and Nations. The University of Chicago Press.

Kostakis, V., & Bauwens, M. (2014). Network society and future scenarios for a collaborative economy. Springer.

Root, T. (2019, July 3). The “right to repair” your computer and iPhone, explained. Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/7/3/18761691/right-to-repair-computers-phones-car-mechanics-apple

Sadowski, J. (2020). The internet of landlords: Digital platforms and new mechanisms of rentier capitalism. Antipode, 52(2), 562-580.

Smith, E. (2019, March 18). Is Adobe’s Creative Cloud Too Powerful for Its Own Good? Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kgw83/is-adobes-creative-cloud-too-powerful-for-its-own-good

Srnicek, N. (2016). Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work. Verso Books.

Thatcher, J., O’Sullivan, D., & Mahmoudi, D. (2016). Data colonialism through accumulation by dispossession: New metaphors for daily data. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(6), 990-1006.