Toward a sustainable information society
Jack Linchuan Qiu · 2020
This chapter takes a holistic, historical, normative, and action-oriented approach to critically examine the global political economy of digital media and their relationship with sustainable development. The techno-social reality of the great digital diffusion in the Global South is however often marginalized, if neglected, in Western, Asian studies of digital media, in favor of almost exclusive attention being paid to hackers, artists, consumers. The goals are, first, to empower workers so that they become co-owners of the platform economy, against exploitative corporate platforms like Uber, and, second, to grow coops into new socioeconomic bases for post-capitalist society. The chapter emphasizes issues of ownership, class, worker’s voice, and what Dyer-Witheford calls “the rate of struggle” in the “vortex” of global capitalism, now powered by digital media.