UBI reinforces tech giant monopoly and vectoralism – subsidizes endless vectoralist control of data outflows and endless exploitation of labor

[Matthew, “Money for everything? Universal basic income in a crisis,” Economy and Society, Volume 51, Issue 3, 2022, , Accessed 6/27/23, GDS – PL]

These issues take on salience following the lockdowns enforced in response to COVID-19: these have consolidated prevailing consumption trends favouring online shopping and contactless deliveries over the high street, shifting revenue away from diverse place-based businesses towards tax-avoiding platform corporations like Amazon. Without concomitant measures to close tax loopholes, UBI would subsidise Silicon Valley and give the tech giants a free ride. It risks becoming a public subsidy for tech firms to continue exploiting gig workers and zero-hour contractors through ‘digital Taylorism’ while extracting value from the free labour that produces data (Spencer, Citation2018). UBI thus contains the seed of a dystopian world in which digital denizens are freed from wage slavery only to be dominated differently, as data producers for the harvesting of value by a new class of platform capitalists.

Silicon Valley currently profits from the collective confusion attendant to our transitioning to a new mode of regulation – or even production – that radically reconfigures capitalism. This goes by various names such as platform capitalism (Srnicek, Citation2016), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, Citation2019), the Amazonian era (Gilbert & Thomas, Citation2021) – following Fordism and post-Fordism – or even something beyond capitalism, vectoralism (Wark, Citation2019). This new economy – based on digital platforms and big data – was, by 2016, worth £250 billion to the EU alone and by 2020 represented over 4 per cent of the EU’s GDP (Mathers, Citation2020). The free labour provided by digital denizens underpins the huge profits made in Silicon Valley. As early as 2011, Facebook reported $1 billion annual profits, with only 4,000 paid employees – but 64 billion hours of free labour from users (Mathers, Citation2020). By 2016, the companies with the highest market capitalization were (for the first time ever) tech firms: Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Apple, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Microsoft. Their market dominance has grown dramatically through the pandemic: corporate earnings reported in April 2021 revealed combined yearly revenue of around $1.2 trillion, more than a quarter higher than in April 2020; over this period, Amazon’s sales soared by 44 per cent to $108.5 billion. These five companies are parasitically dependent not only on outsourced under-paid precarious labour and the free labour of users but also on the free gifts of their technologies; Google’s android phones use Linux for their operating systems – an open source project collectively created and maintained as a common gift by the global free software movement (D’Mello, Citation2019).

If such trends continue, UBI may act as a subsidy for platform corporations to extract profits by providing data producers with an income to interact online, to create content for free or engage in collective projects for innovating new open source technologies (Mathers, Citation2020). No wonder Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are amongst the most vocal proponents of UBI (Fouksman & Klein, Citation2019). The tech start-up incubator Y Combinator is funding a $60 million experiment in UBI in two US states; Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes is funding another pilot project; while Google’s Foundation google.org is a major funder of GiveDirectly’s UBI pilots in Western Kenya, where 21,000 adults across hundreds of villages will receive around a third of average income for 12 years – the longest and largest trial ever conducted (Arnold, Citation2018).

The tech giants of Silicon Valley are the epitome of what Wark (Citation2015, Citation2019) theorizes as ‘vectoralists’ in an emergent mode of production structured increasingly around vectors rather than capital per se. Vectoralism is not a direct replacement of capitalism – for it does not abolish the value form – but coexists with it, as a hybrid layer. Just as feudal landlords were subordinated by early capitalists as the dominant class, with landlords continuing to play powerful roles as rentiers in financialized capital accumulation, vectoralists such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are today beginning to subordinate the traditional capitalist class. If feudalism was based on the extraction of rents from tenant farmers and capitalism on the exploitation of surplus value from labour, then vectoralism collects and controls the interest accruing from data through exploiting differentials in unequal information exchanges with ‘hackers’ – Wark’s evocative term for all those engaged in the production of data and information. Although concentrated in the urban centres of the overdeveloped world, hackers are increasingly everyone – that is, anyone who uses the internet and thereby produces new data from which to appropriate value.

If, as Wark (Citation2015) connotes, feudalism was centred on forming matter into material goods and industrial capitalism on transforming matter into commodities through the application of labour mixed with new-found fossil-fuel energy sources to create industrial concentrations of capital, then vectoralism involves informing these flows of energy with applied knowledge into abstract vectors of data across time and space. In each of these transformations of nature, new property rights are innovated to privatize common goods and the value created. Feudalism invented forms of land ownership (freehold/leasehold), industrial capitalism invented legal institutions for appropriating labour, and labour retaliated by winning rights, often by appeal to the state to legislate, for example, eight-hour working days and weekends. There is a qualitative leap with the shift to information – abstract, immaterial and infinitely-shareable. Unlike the scarcity underpinning capitalism, information can only be made scarce through artificial impositions – new property rights like copyright and patent law – against which hackers must organize. Wark intentionally overstates her case for vectoralism as a novel mode of production precisely to dispel the capitalocentrism of Marxist categories; to get us thinking more imaginatively, as Marx did, about how capitalism is evolving with other currents and potentially mutating into something new. Whatever its merits as a coherent theory of capital, it raises an important question for anti-capitalists: Is UBI the right response to emergent vectoralist control?

According to Wark, vectoralists are not interested in owning the means of production, happily letting capitalists continue in this role; vectoralists are concerned only with controlling the material means of transmitting, storing and interpreting big data to realize its predictive potential, owning the patents that enable monopolies over technologies and, crucially, controlling the supply chains and logistical flows that realize the value of data (Wark, Citation2019). Many capitalist firms enrolled in the production and distribution of material goods are, argues Wark, increasingly shifting their business models away from capital towards vectors, evident amongst the world’s largest corporations, notably in retail and logistics. Walmart profits from its sovereignty over a vast global network of outsourced supply chains governed by sophisticated algorithms (Phillips & Rozworski, Citation2019). Amazon is the inverse example of a putative tech firm whose actual business is in material goods and distribution through infrastructural chains governed by vectors. Vectoralism thus overlays and intersects with the capitalist economy of commodity production and the foundational economy of material needs fulfilment in increasingly penetrative ways, with big implications for the governance of cities and urban life. Vectoralist power in urban everyday life is conveyed by Bratton’s (Citation2016) visceral image of the ‘stack’. This is modelled on Amazon’s business model: a vertical layered stack of needs fulfilment along a vector from the user’s digital interface – a smartphone or Amazon Echo device – to the planet’s resources and energy required to meet that need via various layers: from the physical and human infrastructures of the city – including delivery gig workers and Amazon’s notorious ‘fulfilment centres’ – to the digital infrastructure of the cloud. The stack is governed by algorithms such as Amazon’s Alexa AI mainframe enabling smooth and seamless information flows, mediated by sensors and smart devices embedded in urban environments as part of smart city agendas (Morozov & Bria, Citation2018).

Platform corporations are beginning to colonize the vectoralist frontier of urban infrastructure and the foundational economy, seeking to out-compete non-profit, cooperative and public providers. Uber and Airbnb utilize algorithms to sweat their assets and create a ‘perpetual ride’ or provide proprietors with perpetual rents to supplement falling wages. This mirrors the ‘Walmart effect’ of falling real incomes outpaced by faster-falling retail prices due to technology-induced efficiency savings concealing economic exploitation twice over: employing precarious and gig workers in the global North and tapping into cheap suppliers in the global South (Morozov & Bria, Citation2018, pp. 16–17). The logical end-point is for ‘shadow welfare states’ or a ‘privatized Keynesianism’ operated by vectoralists and built on extraction of value from hacker data and public subsidies, including, potentially, UBI. Thus, unfurls one especially dystopian thread in the basic income narrative.