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The Digital Spatial Fix

Greene, Daniel Marcus, Joseph, Daniel·2015·tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
DOI 10.31269/triplec.v13i2.659
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Abstract

This article brings distinct strands of the political economy of communication and economic geography together in order to theorise the role digital technologies play in Marxian crisis theory. Capitalist advances into digital spaces do not make the law of value obsolete, but these spaces do offer new methods for displacing overaccumulated capital, increasing consumption, or accumulating new, cheaper labour. We build on David Harvey’s theory of the spatial fix to describe three digital spatial fixes, fixed capital projects that use the specific properties of digital spaces to increase the rate of profit, before themselves becoming obstacles to the addictive cycle of accumulation: the primitive accumulation of time in the social Web, the annihilation of time by space in high-frequency trading, and affect rent in virtual worlds. We conclude by reflecting on how these digital spatial fixes also fix the tempo of accumulation and adjust the time-scale of Marxian crisis theory.

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  • Data appropriation is a form of fundamental appropriation of resource or extraction.

    “More helpful are approaches which see what is going on with data as a form of fundamental appropriation of resource (Greene and Joseph 2015;Thatcher et al. 2016, drawing on Harvey 2004) or extraction (Mezzadra and Neilson 2017).”

    From Data colonialism: rethinking big data’s relation to the contemporary subject (2019) · cites this paper as Greene and Joseph 2015

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Cited by

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Authors
Greene, D. M., & Joseph, D.
Affiliations
  • University of Maryland
  • Ryerson and York Universities
Venue
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
Publisher
Information Society Research
Published
2015-06-14
Volume
13
Issue
2
Pages
223-247
ISSN
1726-670X
DOI
10.31269/triplec.v13i2.659
Cited by
35
References
2

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