10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17588
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2038-3460
17588
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Maurizio Teli
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Christian Fuchs, Digital Capitalism: Media, Communication and Society Volume Three, Routledge, 2021
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
13
Book Reviews
2023-02-19
2023-06-30
2023-02-19
2023-10-30
169-173
TS
Maurizio Teli
2022
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17588
169
Aalborg University
2038-3460
2
en
173
Christian Fuchs, Digital Capitalism: Media, Communication and Society Volume Three, Routledge, 2021
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17588/16436
13
Book Review                                                                      169

if they do not read French. Aside from providing an array of tools for prob-
lematizing cities, as well as exploring how to conduct fieldwork in the myr-
iad, but invisible oligoptica of cities-in-the-making, it is also a more-than-
textual writing experiment that combines both photographic and essayistic
genres. More so, Paris Ville Invisible is a thoughtful exploration into in-
ventive ways of writing; it is full of tropes into Frenchness, hints at the
popularisation of Paris in films, novels, and souvenirs and stands for a
whole generation of ANT that is preoccupied with composing texts that
reflect the heterogeneity of the worlds that are enacted.

Afterwords
     The entire book review was written before Bruno Latour’s passing and should
not be read as an obituary but as a tribute to the broader lessons that Latour’s work
and ANT’s early generation have taught us, especially to STS and urban research-
ers. Lessons for which I will be forever grateful.

References
Denis, J. and Pontille, D. (2014) Maintenance Work and the Performativity of Urban
        Inscriptions: The Case of Paris Subway Signs, in “Environment and Planning
        D: Society and Space”, 32(3), pp. 404-416.
Farías, I. (2010) Introduction: Decentring the Object of Urban Studies’, in I. Farias
        and T. Bender (eds.), Urban assemblages: How actor-network theory changes
        urban studies, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 1-24.
Latour, B. (2012) Introduction: Paris, Invisible City: The Plasma, in “City, Culture
       and Society”, 3(2), pp. 91-93.
Tironi, M. and Sánchez Criado, T. (2015) Of Sensors and Sensitivities: Towards a
        Cosmopolitics of “Smart Cities”?, in “Tecnoscienza: Italian Journal of Sci-
        ence and Technology Studies”, 6(1), pp. 89-108.

                                      ***

   Christian Fuchs
Digital Capitalism: Media, Communication and Society Volume Three,
London, Routledge, 2021, pp. 342

Maurizio Teli, Department of Planning, Aalborg University, Denmark

   Christian Fuchs’s work is well known by whoever has navigated sociol-
ogy of media and communication in the last fifteen years. Since the monu-
mental Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age (Fuchs
170                                                                   Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


2007), Fuchs has continuously discussed contemporary media structures and
communication practices while updating critical theory to the task, with a
focus on the Internet and what he now calls Digital Capitalism. The latter is
the focus of the third volume of a multi-volume series on “Media, Commu-
nication and Society” (Fuchs 2021c), a series that includes books on Marxist
Humanism and Communication Theory (Fuchs 2021a), Foundations of Criti-
cal Theory (Fuchs 2021b), Digital Fascism (Fuchs 2022a), Digital Ethics
(Fuchs 2022b), and Digital Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere (Fuchs
2022c). The prolific work Fuchs does is characterized by a few common traits
that apply also to the book reviewed here, Digital Capitalism (Fuchs 2021c).
    First of all, Fuchs’s writing is essential, privileging a schematic and di-
rect way of articulating his perspective that serves well the goals of the
book. An STS reader used to forms of writing that are evocative, often eth-
nographically rich, and that build connections between local practices and
more abstract logics, can perceive Fuchs’ linearity, and tendency to sum-
marize his arguments in tables and bullet points, as a way of limiting access
to the nuances of the phenomena he focuses on. In my understanding, this
perception would be well-placed if it wasn’t for the second, fundamental,
aspect of Fuchs’ work and writing, its immense theoretical width. Only in
the book I am reviewing here, Digital Capitalism, Fuchs includes chapters
on updating, and confronting from a contemporary perspective, the theo-
retical contributions of authors like Friedrich Engels, Georg Lukács, The-
odor W. Adorno, Henri Lefebvre, and Dallas Smythe. Those chapters
open the book, and constitute the backbone of the first of the two main
parts, called respectively “Theorists” and “Themes”. Basically, all the
books in the series on “Media, Communication and Society” follow a sim-
ilar structure, with an initial part devoted to theoretical inquiries and a sec-
ond part oriented toward the application of the theoretical concepts to
contemporary digitalized societies. If that isn’t something unexpected, as
such structure is relatively conventional in academic writing, what stands as
impressive is Fuchs productivity, that places him as one of the most prolific
and influential contemporary sociologists of media and communication.
    The aforementioned productivity wouldn’t be so interesting if the
quantitative aspect of it wasn’t sided by a qualitative dimension that is ab-
solutely worth engaging with. Just staying at the book object of this review,
the initial qualitative aspect to stress is the definition of digital capitalism
that Fuchs provides,

      digital capitalism is a dimension of the capitalist formation of society that
      emerged in the 20th century and has ever since shaped society. Digital cap-
      italism is not a new totality, not a new formation of society. It is not a new
      society, but rather a novel feature and dimension of the capitalist formation
      of society […] digital capitalism is not just a digital practice and not just a
      digital structure, it is the totality of the dialectics of digital practices and
      digital structures that take place in capitalist society […] digital capitalism
Book Review                                                                            171

    is an antagonistic society, which means it is a digital class society and a dig-
    ital form of domination. (pp. 27, 29, emphasis in the original text)

    From an STS perspective, especially one adopting a flat epistemology,
the way through which Fuchs delimits digital capitalism can sound a little
too rushed but it is in the same page that Fuchs provides a perspective that
can help build a bridge between the stress on forms of domination and the
empirical inquiries that characterize many STS research. In particular, it is
stressing the unequal power structures that unfold in digital capitalism,
that it is possible to find research directions through which Fuchs’s defini-
tion of digital capitalism can be questioned and/or refined.
    One of the schematic summaries provided is a classification of the three
main aspects along which accumulation takes place in digital capitalism:
economic, political, and cultural accumulations (for the ones with access
to the book, the summary is provided in Table 1.3 at page 29). Fuchs pre-
liminarily defines those forms of accumulation as the “accumulation of dig-
ital capital based on digital commodities” (economic), the “accumulation
of decision-power in respect to the control of digital knowledge and digital
networks” (politics), and the “accumulation of reputation, attention and
respect by the spread of ideologies on and of the Internet” (culture). I see
in this summary potential for a dialogue between Fuchs’s sociology of me-
dia and STS scholarship, in particular on understanding how empirically,
and in a situated manner, accumulation takes place and relates to other
aspects of life and technologies. In fact, although still relatively abstract,
those three definitions allow for a narrowing down and tracing in local
contexts of economic, political, and cultural accumulations. For example,
the political aspect can easily relate to the STS studies of digital networks
and the making of computing knowledge, from managing digital infra-
structures (Musiani et al. 2016; Crabu and Magaudda 2018) to hacking
dominant systems (Kelty 2008; Coleman 2014).
    Empirically speaking, Fuchs articulates his perspective on empirical re-
search in one of the chapters listed as “Themes”, Chapter 7, From Digital
Positivism and Administrative Big Data Analytics Towards Critical Digital
and Social Media Research (pp. 177-192). I have found this chapter reso-
nating well with the specific standpoint from which I write, one of the atyp-
ical design researchers with training in STS and critical theory. This chap-
ter looks indeed capable of opening up a conversation with STS research
based on the critique of what Fuchs refers to as digital positivism. That is
referred to as the extensive use of “big data analytics” as a way of doing
research that ends up being:

    administrative [… that is] predominantly concerned with how to make
    technologies and administration more efficient and effective”, forgetting
    about “philosophy, theory, critique [and…] academia’s educational role.
    (p. 180)
172                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 13 (2)


    After having brought into the picture some Marxian concepts of inter-
est and the concept of digital sociology as bases for an inquiry that is not
administrative, Fuchs articulates what he refers to as:

      critical digital methods [that] do not simply apply large-scale quantitative
      analysis to these data but use smaller samples that are analysed with the
      help of qualitative methods and interpreted with the help of critical theory.
      (p. 186)

      Critical digital methods are connected, in the following of the chapter, to:

      critical moral realism in social media research [that] tries to create
      knowledge about social media that helps understanding what is absent in
      the world and needs to be created (absenting absence), in order to foster
      participatory democracy, freedom, justice, fairness, and equality. (p. 189)

    These latter references, to critical digital methods and their research
ethics, correlate, seem to me, a clear opening for a fruitful exchange be-
tween Fuchs’s proposals and the ones who interpret STS as an engaged
program or, like myself, who sits in between STS and design research, in
which what is absent and needs to be created becomes one of the foci. That
becomes even more evident as the book progresses, as in Chapter 10, Cap-
italism, Patriarchy, Slavery, and Racism in the Age of Digital Capitalism and
Digital Labour, and Chapter 11, Digital Labour and Imperialism, in which
Fuchs deals with issues that are at the centre of STS feminist and post-
colonial reflections. In particular, Fuchs expands on the aforementioned
economic, political, and cultural aspects of accumulation to point to the
forms that labour – wage, slave, reproductive, and unpaid digital labour –
assumes in relation to these three dimensions. The details through which
those forms of labour are connected – in Chapter 10 – to different forms
of accumulation, open up for what can be a fruitful conversation between
Fuchs’s critical sociology and STS feminist and post-colonial strands. In
particular, the attention given to aspects like the means of production, the
product, spaces and time of labour, its legal regulation, forms of coercion
and control, and ideological stand, is an articulated proposal for further
empirical deepening (for the ones with access to the book, Table 10.4, pp.
248-249, provides a comprehensive summary of these relations).
    In conclusion, I think that Fuchs’s book is a great one for whoever, in
STS – and nearby fields like the part of design research I engage with – is
willing to confront the situated research they conduct with the vast tradi-
tion that has put capitalism as the focus of study and critique, giving new
steam to all participants to the conversation.
Book Review                                                                   173

References
Coleman, G. (2014) Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anon-
      ymous, London and New York, Verso Books.
Crabu, S. and Magaudda, P. (2018) Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and
       Technology in Building a Wireless Community Network, in “Computer Sup-
       ported Cooperative Work (CSCW)”, 27(2), pp. 149-76.
Fuchs, C. (2007) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age, New
       York, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2021a) Marxist Humanism and Communication Theory: Media, Commu-
       nication and Society Volume One, London, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2021b) Foundations of Critical Theory: Media, Communication and Society
       Volume Two, London, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2021c) Digital Capitalism: Media, Communication and Society Volume
       Three, London, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2022a) Digital Fascism: Media, Communication and Society Volume Four,
       London, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2022b) Digital Ethics: Media, Communication and Society Volume Five,
       London, Routledge.
Fuchs, C. (2022c) Digital Democracy and the Digital Public Sphere: Media, Commu-
       nication and Society Volume Six, London, Routledge.
Kelty, C.M. (2008) Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Durham,
        Duke University Press Books.
Musiani, F., Cogburn, D.L., DeNardis, L. and Levinson, N.S. (2016) The Turn to
      Infrastructure in Internet Governance, in “Information Technology and
      Global Governance”, New York, Palgrave Macmillan.

                                    ***

    Max Liboiron
Pollution is Colonialism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2021, pp. 216

Miriam Tola University of Lausanne

   Laboratory studies are a popular genre within STS. Since Latour and
Woolgar’s Laboratory Life, a now classic ethnography of a neuroendocri-
nology lab in California (1979), STS has long been interested in science in
the making. Following the day-to-day work of scientists, lab studies show
that scientific knowledge emerges through the interactions between humans,
