The hyper-connectivity of the Internet has allowed capital to intensify its exploitation. Companies like Uber, AirBnB, Google, Facebook and etc. are constantly in the headlines, or at least in leftist consciousness, appearing as the new exploiters par excellence. But how?
As in many cases before, it is arbitrage that has always been the secret weapon of the businessman. With arbitrage, the businessman occupies two spaces at once, and upon discovering a strength in one space and a weakness in the other, uses the former against the latter.
This is most obvious in the form of globalization, with advanced communication and data management technologies that allow companies to exploit vulnerable labor, tax, and environmental law in developing countries to gather the maximal return on investment.
But there are other ways in which this arbitrage plays out. For example, the Internet, with its hyper-connectivity, has supplanted the function of actual space, which allows people to gather and coordinate cooperation. These companies are taking advantage of a gap in social and legal understanding of the implications of an Internet sphere of interaction.
It took time and suffering to achieve the legal standards which govern actual human relations in space. The technological developments which have allowed an entirely different modality of interaction have happened too fast for legal and regulatory systems that are dominated by older generations, who relate differently and think differently about these technologies.
Further the technologies and the levels of abstraction are very dense. Within the Internet domain it is easier to hide one's deeper motivations and intentions, though our understanding of these things is quickly catching up. And it is easier to hide and wave away failures like security flaws and thefts, where it is difficult to trace hackers or stolen data, and so there is a plausible deniability of customer vulnerabilities.
This happens in investment as well. All of this vaporware, such as the self-driving car and space exploration technologies, with their incredible complexities and abstract efficacies, can be hyped by investors for as long as their actual implementation is delayed, with all of the attendant resources flowing to those projects until it is too late.
The dense and complex technologies, upon necessitating divisions of labor and therefore divisions of understanding and perception, coupled with rapid and explosive cultural, social, and economic change, allow for a dense foliage to navigate, a perfect camouflage for those nimble businessmen who know how to navigate it and derive advantage from it.
And so the nimble capitalist, with his socially permitted and generated resources, gladly navigates the jagged and explosive social and cultural landscapes that he plays a tremendous part in cultivating, and derives advantage from the many discontinuities in visibility and understanding that arise from them.
