New special issue: New Frontiers of Techno-economic Rentiership

New Frontiers of Techno-Economic Rentiership [Competition & Change]

"In this guest introduction, we explore emerging critiques at the frontiers of techno-economic rentiership. Rentiership is a process entailing political-economic and technological (i.e. techno-economic) relations, formations, practices, and justifications underpinning the ownership and/or control of assets, which enable the capture of future revenue streams (i.e. what we call rents). Conceptually, in this context, rentiership permits us to analyse the increasingly diverse techno-economic dimensions of those future revenue streams, rather than being a normative term for identifying ‘good’ or ‘bad’ forms of revenue (i.e. profit vs. rent)...."

• ‘Introduction’ by Kean Birch, Callum Ward, Eliot Tretter
• ‘Intellectual property, technorents and the labour share of production’ by Herman M Schwartz
• ‘Amazon: A story of accumulation through intellectual rentiership and predation’ by Cecilia Rikap
• ‘The moral economy of the algorithmic crowd: Possessive collectivisim and techno-economic rentiership’ by Mark Kear
• ‘Land grabbing or value grabbing? Land rent and wind energy in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca’ by Lourdes Alonso Serna

Recent Opeds on Big Tech & Competion Policy

I've had a couple of opinion pieces come out over the last couple of months in Canada's National Post newspaper dealing with competition and Big Tech. They can be accessed here:

• Opinion: We need to get beyond the status quo in regulating Big Tech in Canada (10 January 2022)
  

• Opinion: Big Tech poses challenges our outdated competition laws were not designed to address (29 November 2021)

There's an interesting public debate going on right now in Canada around whether the government needs to introduce new competition laws/policies to deal with Big Tech. On one side are commentators who think the status quo is fine and nothing needs changing; on the other side (where I sit), there are a group of people who that think that current laws and regulations are just not able to deal with the fundamental differences with Big Tech.

Consultation Submission: Examining the Canadian Competition Act in the Digital Era

I just submitted a consultation response to Senator Wetston's call to examine Canada's Competition Act in the 'digital era'. 

My response covers three areas: (1) a call for more diversity in this debate on competition in Canada; (2) a response to several key issues raised in Edward Iacobucci’s report on which Senator Wetston's consultation is based; and (3) an opinion piece of mine published in the National Post which summarizes why we need to rethink competition policy and law in Canada in light of the rise of Big Tech.

See my response here.

Editorship Proposal: "Science, Technology & Human Values"

The Society for the Social Studies of Science - one of the world's key learned society for science and technology studies, or STS - was looking for nominations/proposals for Editorship of its flagship journal, Science, Technology & Human Values (STHV). It's one of the top two journals in the field of STS, so has some prestige behind it. I've been a member of its Editorial Board since 2018, and I was totally chuffed about being asked to join it.

I was thinking about nominating myself - and asking someone else to join me - for the new Editorship, but I'm already a Co-Editor of another STS journal, Science as Culture, so it didn't seem either likely that I'd be selected, or, even if I was, it didn't seem like it'd be a healthy situation for STS as a field to have one person as Editor of two key journals.

So, instead, I thought I'd do something different.

In short, I submitted a proposal for rethinking the editorial position, selection, and process itself, combining what I called support for a "meta-editorial process" with an open, transparent, and democratic selection of 10 new Editors to form an Editorial Collective. That way, anyone could nominate themselves and no-one would benefit from an advantageous position within an existing prestige or personal network.

With the proposal for a meta-editorial process, I'm suggesting that we need to rethink the way we, as a field, organize journal publishing altogether. And my suggestion is that we need to take a more collective and coordinated approach across STS journals, rather than thinking about editorial process as being the domain of each journal individually.

Here's my proposal.

Podcasts & Online Talks

Here are some podcasts I've done recently. I've got a couple more lined up:

• Interview on “Facebook Effect and the Rise of the Data Economy” for The Priv8 Podcast (Jul 2021).
• Lecture on “The Rise of Technoscientific Capitalism” for Crash Course Economics Podcast (Apr 2021).
• Interview on “Managed Spaces” for Ideal Spaces Podcast (Oct 2020).

Also, here are some videos of talks, discussions, etc. that I've been involved in recently:

• Birch, K. (2021) Automated neoliberalism?, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, University of Melbourne, Australia.
• Birch, K. (2021) The Rise of Technoscientific Capitalism, Crash Course Economics, online.
• Panellist (2021) On value, outcomes, and digital data, Data Economics Festival, online.
• Birch, K. (2021) Assetization and the new asset geographies, Department of Geography Seminar Series, University of Zurich, Switzerland.
• Birch, K. (2021) Thinking through assetization and value in 3D printing, Symposium on Re-imagining the Futures of 3D Printing in Society, Heidelberg University, Germany.
• Birch, K. (2021) Assetization, STS Seminar Series, York University, Canada.

Data Economics Festival: "On Value, Outcomes, and Data"

My lecture for CrashCourse Economics on "The Rise of Technoscientific Capitalism"

 

Link here.