Thread by @dellsystem

some grim monday morning news: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is buying Time magazine for $190m

this ties together various things i've been thinking about lately: digital advertising & journalism; rent extraction on the internet; intellectual property; & entrepreneurship.

[thread]

this isn't an isolated thing. the backdrop is important: 5 years ago, Bezos bought the Washington Post; the year before that, Chris Hughes of FB bought The New Republic.

rather than going into the merits (or otherwise) of Benioff as an individual, we need a structural analysis

some quick background on Salesforce (1999): they do a lot, so it's hard to describe them precisely, but broadly they make enterprise software for sales & marketing. this core product has scaled quickly - they've gobbled up potential competitors & become a key player in this space

Salesforce is a great demonstration of the power of digital technology, which has proven conducive to centralisation & hence very useful for capital accumulation. if you control enough of a particular service, you can essentially charge monopoly rent & reinvest that into growing

from a Marxist perspective, I think David Harvey's notion of a spatial fix is useful here - capital is expanding to new terrain, and even if the "space" here is virtual, that doesn't make it less lucrative. money made on the internet is money in real life (see: Salesforce Tower)

so what's the alternative to letting tech moguls colonise what should have been a common good & becoming fabulously wealthy in the process?

it has to come down to taking the internet out of the capital accumulation process (cf Robert McChesney's interview in the latest Catalyst)

to be clear, i think everything should be taken out of the capital accumulation process *eventually*, but the internet should be a priority because of how lucrative it is

(NS will be running a piece elaborating on the technical challenges involved in that process this week!)

what does this mean in practice? i don't know what the details would be, but generally it means entrepreneurship as a public service, not a capitalist endeavour. it means challenging the notion of intellectual property in the digital space. let's not create any more Benioffs, pls

might write something longer about this, because this saga is a salient demonstration of the dangers of corporate capture of the internet, which i don't think has been given enough attention from the left

in the meantime, see: newsocialist.org.uk/democratising-… & newsocialist.org.uk/tackling-the-p…

the second link I posted above doesn't show up in the preview, so here's another try at re-sharing this excellent piece by @leowatkins91 chronicling the decline of journalism & what we can do about it newsocialist.org.uk/democratising-…

the more i read about this deal, the more grim it gets. profits over people am i right