The Political Economy Of Digital Ecosystems

This book connects political economy perspectives with scenario planning for mapping out future trajectories of digital ecosystems. The focus is purposefully on digital ecosystems as it encompasses economic, political and social contexts on a global, national and local level. The diversity of political economy approaches allows the author to explore alternative meanings of digital ecosystem development, which is particularly useful for envisioning alternative futures. Often visions about the future of digital ecosystems suffer from a lack of imagination and confirmation bias which is favorable to the extrapolation of current trends. A wide range of political economy perspectives applied through positivist theorizing in this book shows different interpretations of developments in digital ecosystems. Scenario planning teams around the world have applied a collective imagination to show how future trajectories can be radically different from the current trends. The book outlines meta-scenarios for alternative futures of the political economy of digital ecosystems by reviewing and synthesizing the work of foresight teams. These meta-scenarios served as insights for developing four scenarios for European digital ecosystems through the workshops with high-level executives and experts. The scenarios identified the nature of EU cooperation and the development of digital infrastructure as key drivers. These four scenarios developed in the workshops are further operationalized in a specific context by exploring the implications for Estonia as well as for Chinese investments in European platforms. This exercise shows how scenarios of digital ecosystems can be used for stress-testing decisions and strategies. Decision-makers, students, scholars and other stakeholders in a wide range of industries ranging from academia to ride-sharing can use the scenarios for reframing different development trajectories and future-proofing their strategies. The scenarios can be further developed and modified for specific purposes and contexts as they are not written in stone.

At a time when the practices of technology companies continue to attract fierce criticism, this book asks what it actually means to hold a 'monopoly' in the tech world and how it might affect the way in which an organization operates. Combining new and traditional Marxian perspectives, the authors offer an in-depth analysis of how these technology giants are produced, financialized, and regulated. As technology firms continue to shape our political and socio-economic landscape, this book will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students who seek to understand the function of technological monopolies in contemporary capitalism.

With digital automation becoming ubiquitous, the relationship between man and machine is being redefined. This book, through a focus on America, identifies the tension this relationship has produced, and how it has divided America socially, politically, and economically, ultimately breeding two fundamentally incompatible nations within one: the “forgotten America” and “elite America.” This book enables the reader to visualize the changes brought by automation on our producer and buyer identities, and suggests policy changes that global leaders could adopt to deal with the increasing discord. The book is heavily dependent on a few fundamental concepts of both economics and sociology, such as globalization, labor economics, and cultural homogenization. The book is ideally suited to students and academics researching political economics and sociology, with focuses on globalization, unemployment, and the social impacts of technological advances.

Anything that can be automated, will be. The "magic" that digital technology has brought us - self-driving cars, Bitcoin, high frequency trading, the internet of things, social networking, mass surveillance, the 2009 housing bubble - has not been considered from an ideological perspective. The Critique of Digital Capitalism identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities, and also describes digital capitalism as an ideologically "invisible" framework that is realized in technology. Written as a series of articles between 2003 and 2015, the book provides a broad critical scope for understanding the inherent demands of capitalist protocols for expansion without constraint (regardless of social, legal or ethical limits) that are increasingly being realized as autonomous systems that are no longer dependent on human labor or oversight and implemented without social discussion of their impacts. The digital illusion of infinite resources, infinite production, and no costs appears as an "end to scarcity," whereby digital production supposedly eliminates costs and makes everything equally available to everyone. This fantasy of production without consumption hides the physical costs and real-world impacts of these technologies. The critique introduced in this book develops from basic questions about how digital technologies directly change the structure of society: why is "Digital Rights Management" not only the dominant "solution" for distributing digital information, but also the only option being considered? During the burst of the "Housing Bubble" burst 2009, why were the immaterial commodities being traded of primary concern, but the actual physical assets and the impacts on the people living in them generally ignored? How do surveillance (pervasive monitoring) and agnotology (culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data) coincide as mutually reinforcing technologies of control and restraint? If technology makes the assumptions of its society manifest as instrumentality - then what ideology is being realized in the form of the digital computer? This final question animates the critical framework this analysis proposes. Digital capitalism is a dramatically new configuration of the historical dynamics of production, labor and consumption that results in a new variant of historical capitalism. This contemporary, globalized network of production and distribution depends on digital capitalism's refusal of established social restraints: existing laws are an impediment to the transcendent aspects of digital technology. Its utopian claims mask its authoritarian result: the superficial "objectivity" of computer systems are supposed to replace established protections with machinic function - the uniform imposition of whatever ideology informs the design. However, machines are never impartial: they reify the ideologies they are built to enact. The critical analysis of capitalist ideologies as they become digital is essential to challenging this process. Contesting their domination depends on theoretical analysis. This critique challenges received ideas about the relationship between labor, commodity production and value, in the process demonstrating how the historical Marxist analysis depends on assumptions that are no longer valid. This book therefore provides a unique, critical toolset for the analysis of digital capitalist hegemonics.

span, SPAN { background-color:inherit; text-decoration:inherit; white-space:pre-wrap }This book places Indonesia at the forefront of the global debate about the impact of ‘disruptive’ digital technologies. Digital technology is fast becoming the core of life, work, culture and identity. Yet, while the number of Indonesians using the Internet has followed the upward global trend, some groups — the poor, the elderly, women, the less well-educated, people living in remote communities — are disadvantaged. This interdisciplinary collection of essays by leading researchers and scholars, as well as e-governance and e-commerce insiders, examines the impact of digitalisation on the media industry, governance, commerce, informal sector employment, education, cybercrime, terrorism, religion, artistic and cultural expression, and much more. It presents groundbreaking analysis of the impact of digitalisation in one of the world’s most diverse, geographically vast nations. In weighing arguments about the opportunities and challenges presented by digitalisation, it puts the very idea of a technological ‘revolution’ into critical perspective.

It has taken platforms only twenty years to become digital economy hubs. They have changed markets, enterprises, and society. They have expedited communication, collaboration, and trade for consumers, winning their attention and collecting their data. In doing so, they have made processes, products, and industries obsolete, and disrupted the expectations and behaviours of market players. This raises the question, are digital platforms global innovators or disruptive monopolists? Are they a solution to problems of the past or emissaries of a problematic future? This book provides a multi-faceted approach to platforms and their profound impact on markets and ecosystems. Economic, managerial, social, and political aspects are analysed, and the differentiation of platforms and their disruptive potential is reviewed. The book also examines the mechanism of achieving a monopolistic position, including in the international supply chain, and the greater influence of platforms on political activity and contemporary democracy. With examples from Poland, USA, and China, the contributions offer an international evaluation of disruptive platforms across a multitude of industries. The edited collection, prepared by scholars from the SGH Warsaw School of Economics, will be valuable to researchers and academics across the fields of strategic management, marketing, innovations, international business, and the digital economy.

This book provides a coherent Blockchain framework for the business community, governments, and universities structured around microeconomics, macroeconomics, finance, and political economy and identifies how business organizations, financial markets and governmental policies are changed by digitalization, specifically Blockchain. This framework, what they authors call “disintermediation economics,” affects everything by providing a paradigm that transforms the way we organize markets and value chains, financial services, central banking, budgetary policies, innovation ecosystems, government services, and civil society. Bringing together leading and experienced policy makers, corporate practitioners, and academics from top universities, this book offers a road map of best practices that can be immediately useful to firms, policy makers as well as academics by balancing theory with practice.

This book explores the intersection of public policy and the fast changing digital media economy. Over the last 20 years, digital technologies and digital content have revolutionized many aspects of social, economic and political life around the world. Governments, locked into the policies and programs of the traditional economy, are struggling to respond to this dynamic and commercially unique global ecosystem. This study examines the nature and extent of the digital economy, looking at both the commercial diversity within the sector and the different digital implementations across the world. While the digital engagement of North America is well known, the scale and intensity of digital growth in East Asia is not fully understood not are the transformative changes occurring in parts of Africa. The digital world is marked by the unexpected and rapid re-orientation of economic, social, cultural and political affairs. The digitization of work, for example, has already brought major disruptions within national economies. Governments are struggling to respond, in part because of pressures from the traditional industrial and resource sectors but also because of the unique, somewhat anarchistic nature of the digital content industry. The Global Digital Economy provides a profile of the global digital environment, reviews current government digital policies (with an emphasis on innovative strategies), and offers policy suggestions for national and subnational governments. Countries that respond creatively to the digital economy--like Taiwan, South Korea, Finland and Israel--stand to prosper from the anticipated accelerated growth of the sector. Those nations that struggle to keep pace with the digital infrastructure needs of the new economy and with the potential for employment and business creation stand to fall behind economically. This book provides a policy roadmap for the digital economy and identifies the risks and opportunities of this core sector in the twenty-first-century economy.