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• Commodification and Disruption: Theorizing Digital Capitalism

  Timo Seidl (Author)

  There is little disagreement that digital technologies are transforming contemporary economies and societies. However, scholars have only begun to systematically think about how digitalization – the process whereby more and more of what we say, think, and do becomes mediated by digital technologies – is both driven by and transformative of capitalism. This paper argues that when one speaks about digitalization, one cannot be silent about capitalism. It reconstructs commodification and disruption as key features of capitalist development. It then shows how three digital revolutions – the platform, (big) data, and artificial intelligence revolutions – have ushered in a new wave of commodification and disruption, giving rise to digital capitalism. Finally, it discusses the challenges commodification and disruption pose in the form of redistribution of resources, rebalancing of power, rule adaption, and market re-embedding. The paper brings together a wide range of scholarship to offer a historically and theoretically grounded framework for how to think about and study the rise of digital capitalism.

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• Editorial: Volume 3, Issue 1

  Martin Emmer, Clara Iglesias Keller, Hanna Krasnova, Martin Krzywdzinski, Axel Metzger, Sonja Schimmler, Lena Ulbricht, Gergana Vladova (Author)

  The five papers in this issue of the Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society examine processes of digitalization from a perspective that encompasses political economy, political science, psychology, and communication science. In turn, the contributors explore the relationship between digitalization and capitalism, the role of civic tech initiatives, the regulation of political micro-targeting on social media, the use of fictive accounts of historical figures on social media, and concepts for the participatory development of research agendas.

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