Capitalism Kritik - Michigan 2024 CGO

Michigan 2024 – CGO Classic – Cap K Links
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Sofia Burgess, Sophia Guan, and Akash Bose for their work on this file. A special shoutout to the techno orientalism GOAT of debate, Gershom Chan.
Copyright
Copyright is a function of capitalism within the modern era.
Cohen 1-2011 (Julie E Cohen, Professor of Law at Georgetown University teaching about copyright, intellectual property, and privacy with a Harvard Law Degree; “Copyright as Property in the Post-Industrial Economy: A Research Agenda”; Georgetown Law; Accessed 7-27-2024; https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/610/;) GH AB:(
Abstract The incentives-for-authors formulation of copyright’s purpose is so deeply ingrained in our discourse and our thought processes that it is astonishingly hard to avoid invoking, even when one is consciously trying not to do so. Yet avoiding that formulation is exactly what we ought to be doing. Everything we know about creativity and creative processes suggests that copyright plays very little role in motivating creative work. In the contemporary information society, the purpose of copyright is to enable the provision of capital and organization so that creative work may be exploited. And the choice of copyright as a principal means of promoting cultural production has consequences for the content of culture as well. This reframing has four important consequences for debates about copyright law and policy. First, abandoning the incentives-for-authors story requires us to talk about cultural progress differently. The incentives-for-authors story has functioned as a smokescreen, enabling scholars, judges, and legislators to conflate economic and creative motivation. Severing the motivational link between creativity and economics requires us to come up with a better understanding of how cultural progress emerges, and a more accurate account of how the economic incentives that copyright provides affect progress more generally. Second, an account of copyright as incentives-for-capital suggests a different approach to conceptualizing the kind of “property” that copyright represents. Copyright scholars habitually compare copyright to property in land, a conceptual move that passes over an important stage in the evolution of economic activity and associated economic rights. There are important benefits to be gained from comparing post-industrial, information property to industrial, corporate property, and copyright law more explicitly to corporate law. Specifically, copyright law in the post-industrial era works to separate authorship from control of creative works so that a set of coordination and governance problems closely associated with information resources can be solved. Third, comparing copyright more explicitly to industrial, corporate property and legal regimes governing its use suggests some different ways of thinking and talking about problems of social welfare that so often bedevil regimes of property law. Fourth, comparing copyright more explicitly to industrial, corporate property foregrounds copyright law’s (largely unrealized) potential to function as a tool for ensuring accountability to the authors without whom the copyright system could not function.
Copyright
AI’s development drives economic imperialism, dumping the costs of the global economy on the developing world as a stimulant for global ecological crisis
Dauvergne 22 (Peter, professor of international relations in the department of political science at the University of British Columbia, “Is artificial intelligence greening global supply chains? Exposing the political economy of environmental costs,” Review of International Political Economy, VOL. 29, NO. 3, 696–718, https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1814381) #GoGreen
The shadows of consumption
Goods and waste flowing through global supply chains tend to displace costs far from the end consumer, both psychologically and geographically. This process of ‘ecological displacement’ (Wapner, 2002), or what I think of as shadows of consumption, arises from intentional actions, such as firms exporting plastic waste overseas or governments locating hazardous waste sites in poor neighborhoods, as well as from the general consequences of trade, investment, and market prices externalizing environmental and social costs. Over time these shadow effects tend to drift into places and spaces with less political power, displacing costs in particular into marginalized communities, vulnerable ecosystems, and future generations (Dauvergne, 2008; Wapner, 2002). We see this, for instance, with the costs of AI technologies, where both the manufacturing inputs and the waste outputs are casting harms onto people and ecosystems far from those profiting from these technologies.
Corporate efficiency and productivity gains from artificial intelligence require an infrastructure of electronics, computers, data centers, and smart products. This infrastructure relies heavily on natural resources from developing countries, such as the metal tantalum, extracted from the metallic ore coltan (or columbite-tantalite). In 2017, nearly 60 percent of the world’s supply of mined tantalum came from Africa (Roskill, 2018b). Resistant to heat and corrosion, tantalum is used for capacitors, which regulate and store electrical charges, and transistors, which disperse power. Useful for miniaturizing electronic systems, tantalum is now common in laptops, desktop computers, iPads, and smartphones. Demand for tantalum has been rising steadily over the past decade, and industry analysts expect this trend will endure as sales of electronics look set to keep growing into the foreseeable future (Mordor Intelligence, 2020). Of course, the increasing reliance of TNCs on artificial intelligence and the increasing consumption of smart products are only two of the many sources of the rising demand for tantalum. Still, even a quick glance at the main sources of tantalum for the global electronics industry – places such as the Democratic Republic of Congo with very low regulatory and human rights standards – reveal the potential for any extra demand to cause widespread environmental and social harm (Diemel & Hilhorst, 2019; Eichstaedt, 2011; Nest, 2011).
Rare earth elements are equally vital for the global electronics industry. These elements, which comprise scandium, yttrium, and the fifteen lanthanides in the periodic table, are hard to extract and separate from ore deposits, but are not actually ‘rare’. Highly versatile, the electronics industry relies on these elements for a wide range of applications, including insulation, optical fibers, capacitors, fuel cells, magnets, glass polishing, and fuel cells (Levy et al., 2017). Most electronic products contain at least a few rare earth elements: an average smartphone has eight (Rohrig, 2015). Recycled sources, meanwhile, only account for about one percent of global supply (Binnemans et al., 2013). As with coltan, the mining of rare earth elements has been steadily increasing over the past decade.
This mining has a long history of environmental and human rights abuses (Kiggins, 2015). China has been the primary source of rare earth elements, accounting for around 85 percent of world supply of refined production in 2017 (down from over 95 percent in 2010) (Roskill, 2018a). One open-pit mine in China’s Bayan-Obo district in Inner Mongolia spans 48 square kilometers, and is a kilometer deep in places. Processing rare earth ores creates lakes of toxic waste. As has occurred in Bayan-Obo, this can end up polluting groundwater with carcinogens and contaminating local surroundings with radiation (Ali, 2014; Haque et al., 2014).
The mining of coltan and rare earth elements is far from the only shadow effect of the globalization of computers and smart products. Rising mountains of electronic waste are a further source of extreme social and environmental harm. Worldwide, the annual amount of e-waste has been climbing steadily, from 34 million metric tons in 2010 to approximately 50 million metric tons in 2018: a weight equal to stacking up every commercial airliner ever built (Ryder & Zhao, 2019). The amount of e-waste is set to keep rising as electronic technologies quickly advance, as product and software engineers design products for quick obsolescence, as low-quality, inexpensive products multiply, as brand manufacturers compete to sell new and ‘better’ versions (such as ones with the ‘smart’ features of machine learning), and as corporations advertise smart appliances as a way to live more sustainably. Worldwide, per capita e-waste is on track to rise from 6.1 to 6.8 kilograms from 2016 to 2021 (Balde et al., 2017, p. 4). Over the longer term, the world is heading toward producing as much as 120 million metric tons of e-waste a year by 2050 (Ryder & Zhao, 2019): what the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has described as a ‘tsunami of e-waste rolling out over the world’ (UNEP, 2015).
This tsunami is flooding the developing world with hazardous chemicals and toxic metals. Currently, only one-fifth of global e-waste is safely recycled. A typical North American produces around 20 kilograms of e-waste a year, with perhaps as much as one-third ending up in developing countries (Balde et al., 2017, p. 2, 45, 64). Across the developing world, children, forced labor, and destitute ‘waste pickers’ dismantle electronics to extract small amounts of gold, silver, copper, and cobalt, exposing them to carcinogens, toxins, and dangerous chemicals. Equally disturbing, open-air burning of e-waste is spewing toxic fumes, while e-waste dumped into local landfills is contaminating groundwater, agricultural land, and food supplies (Dauvergne & LeBaron, 2013; Heacock et al., 2016).
Conclusion: the political economy of AI sustainability
Technology has made life easier, safer, and more comfortable. There is no doubt about that (Broers, 2005). Yet overconfidence in technology has also wrought great tragedy, from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 to the deadly radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986 to the nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in 2011. Technology as a global solution for the destructive forces of capitalism will always be paradoxical: solving some problems and causing others. In addition, more often than not, the environmental consequences of any new technology are going to be unpredictable, nonlinear, and hard to trace. At the same time the benefits of any technology, especially advanced technologies, will generally ratchet up the political and financial power of transnational corporations and wealthy states. General-purpose technologies such as computers, electricity, engines, and AI that rev up the technological power of capitalism are especially prone to reinforce – and accelerate – domestic and international inequalities (Lee, 2018).
States and corporations benefiting the most from technological solutions tend to conceal any negative consequences, or, if these come to light, frame them as inevitable ‘externalities’ of creating jobs, generating shareholder earnings, growing economies, and protecting nations. This is the case, as this article has shown, with artificial intelligence. Business leaders are hailing the productivity and efficiency gains from integrating AI into global supply chains as evidence of corporate sustainability and the effectiveness of private environmental governance. When measured in terms of per unit of output, machine learning tools and intelligent automation would indeed appear to be helping TNCs to reduce material inputs, energy use, waste, and labor costs in the middle sections of supply chains. But these seeming gains are not translating into less pressure on natural resources, as TNCs reinvest the savings to expand global production, and as AI deepens natural resource extraction and accelerates overconsumption, casting shadows of harm across vulnerable peoples, ecosystems, and future generations. TNCs are working hard to conceal these costs. Indeed, as this article underscores, it is in the interest of TNCs to depict artificial intelligence as a force of sustainability, as this is reinforcing business as usual, legitimizing corporate self-governance, and obscuring the vital need for states to rein in the rising power of TNCs to deescalate the global environmental crisis.
Trademarks
Trademarks facilitate consumer capitalism.
Griffiths 10-2018 (Andrew Griffiths, Professor of Law, Newcastle Law School, Newcastle University; “Trade Marks and the Consumer Society”; SCRIPTed; Accessed 7-27-2024; https://script-ed.org/article/trade-marks-and-the-consumer-society/#_ftnref52;) GH AB:(
3 How Trade Marks Facilitate Consumerism Ownership of a trade mark gives a firm exclusive rights covering two matters.46 One is the exclusive right to use the sign to brand and differentiate products of a kind for which it has been registered as a trade mark and turn them into specific objects of demand. The second is the exclusive right to determine which products can be marketed under the trade mark and thus with the benefit of its power to attract demand.47 The owner’s exclusive right to use a trade mark to attract demand is reinforced by various ancillary rights over the use of the relevant sign and similar signs both for branding products and as reference points in advertising and in other communication. The owner’s exclusive control over the supply of branded products is also reinforced by various ancillary rights. These include the absolute right to authorise the first marketing of products under the trade mark in the European Economic Area (“EEA”);48 and certain rights over the further marketing of branded goods after their first marketing in the EEA, which protect the trade mark’s reputation and power to attract demand.49 Moreover, along its exclusive control over supply, the owner has discretion as to how it arranges for the production or procurement of that supply and to vary these arrangements.50 The owner’s extensive control over the use of its trade mark for demand-attraction and over supply-provision, together with its discretion over the organisation of supply have made crucial contributions to the ability of some firms to exploit the opportunities of consumerism. It has meant that the marketing of products can be separated from their production so that each activity can develop according to its own economic logic in terms of scale and scope. The ability to do this has enabled firms that are well-placed to attract demand from consumers to focus their efforts and resources on marketing and other higher value activities and to compete at this level. Leading firms in many industries no longer engage in the “Fordist” mass production of products,51 but focus on high value “weightless” activities such as design, product development, marketing whilst orchestrating production from fluid and flexible supply chains.52 Innovation in technology and communication has increased the scope for outsourcing production into supply chains, enabling much greater flexibility in production arrangements and facilitating more rapid product development.53 Consumerism has increased the advantage of outsourcing production in a way that combines low costs with a high degree of flexibility.54 The transformation of Clarks Shoes in the 1990s from a large-scale manufacturer of shoes in the United Kingdom to a global marketing firm that orchestrates the manufacture of shoes through a fluctuating global supply network of manufacturers is an example of this.55 It can also be seen in the fast fashion industry with its globally-recognised brands and global supply chains.56 Whilst the control and discretion that trade mark owners have over supply is important to their capacity to seize and exploit the opportunities of consumerism, their demand-side control makes a much more obvious contribution to this capacity. The foundation of this contribution is the owner’s ability to use a trade mark to give products an identity that is distinctive and exclusive. This kind of identity roughly corresponds to the marketing concept of a brand, though a “brand” is not defined in trade mark law and its relationship with a trade mark can be nebulous.57 Trade marks are both the signifiers and the legal anchors of brands. A firm may use more than one trade mark to signify and anchor a specific brand and may vary the combination or change them,58 though consumers must be likely to recognise each signifier on its own as signifying an exclusive connection to one firm for it to be registered as a trade mark.59 The legal definition of a trade mark as a sign that identifies and distinguishes products as those “of one undertaking” understates the full potential of brands and their trade mark signifiers as marketing resources.60 Firms can use trade marks to differentiate products in other ways as well. Firms can, for example, use trade marks to customise products in terms of their quality and other characteristics and to market different versions of the same kind of product.61 Moreover, a brand owner has control over the customisation that its brand reflects, with discretion to vary quality and other characteristics as long as the brand does not become misleading.62 Firms can also use trade marks to establish different layers of brands under their control to signify different layers of information about the products they supply. These may range from broader corporate or umbrella brands to narrower product or niche brands.63 Their owners have discretion as to how far (if at all) they make the connections between different brands under their control apparent to consumers. The ability to use branding to customise products and to establish different product brands means that firms can profit from satisfying consumers with differing preferences.64 This enables firms to compete more effectively in the dimension of product differentiation, especially with the growth of the tendency associated with consumerism for consumers to attach greater value to differentiation, even superficial differentiation, for its own sake.65 The growth of consumerism has also increased the scope for attracting demand to specific brands of products because of their particular intangible content, which may be their only significant difference from other brands.66 Trade mark law has done much to facilitate the capacity of brands to add intangible content to products through protecting the kind of image and other associations that can give them this capacity. The Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) has gone so far as to recognise that an image of prestige and luxury can form part of the “actual quality” of marked products.67 The foundation of a brand’s capacity to add intangible content is its exclusivity since this gives it an institutional character and establishes commercial accountability for branded products. It enables the brand to acquire a reputation concerning the branded products, which can be a source of reassurance to consumers and attract demand accordingly.68 Moreover, as a cohesive entity with some of the attributes of a humanistic personality, a brand can go further and acquire its own unique history and biography along with an image and other associations.69 This can appeal to consumers at the emotional level and help to offset the impersonal nature of artificial legal structures.70 The continuity of this personality can turn what would otherwise be an isolated act of consumption into something that can be repeated or a continuing relationship.71 A brand’s personality can also help to increase the emotional impact of consumption through transforming branded products into sources of self-expression or self-realisation or into symbols of status or of adherence to particular values reflecting the brand’s reputation, image and associations.72 Trade marks can help to develop the personalitie

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