ABSTRACT
During recent decades, at a cost that is reckoned in the trillions of dollars, digital systems and applications have been introduced across the length and breadth of the business system. 1 This stupendous investment in ICTs, and the profit-strategies that it supports, constitute a basis for naming the contemporary political economy “digital capitalism.” In much the same way that “industrial capitalism” extended beyond manufacturing to reorganize agricultural production and even information industries such as publishing, today digital capitalism has gripped every sector. Historically centered on the United States, yet transnational in scope, new network platforms continue to be innovated in order to extend and enlarge longstanding capitalist imperatives: exploitative wage relations; investment and product development decisions based on profit forecasts; ruthless pressures for cost-efficiency and growth (Schiller 1999, 2014; Wood 2003). This chapter foregrounds the place of science and engineering within this encompassing transition.
