The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy (Digital Barricades)

by Paolo Gerbaudo

These days, instead, the world’s top companies by market valuation are almost entirely digital companies, with Apple worth over a trillion dollars and Amazon coming in the second place, before Google and Facebook. Thus, digital companies have displaced from the top corporate rankings, the oil and car companies – General Motors, Ford, Exxon, Shell and so on – that were the emblematic firms of the industrial era. This certainly does not mean that material production has disappeared. Cars continue to be produced, oil to be extracted, and the devices that make possible complex informational processes possible are hardwired in the mining of specific materials, such as silicon and rare earth minerals. Yet, these processes of production are pushed down the value chain, making the companies that produce them subordinated to the power of digital companies; that by now appear to have surpassed even banks in the echelons of global capitalism, and are in fact trying to become banks themselves, hoping to turn the millions of user accounts they have into credit accounts.95