A little feast on our time
The SoftBank "Vision Fund" master plan for economic domination is not particularly complicated: Give companies lots of money so they can pursue scale and grab all the market share in a particular sector without having to make a profit. Once they have driven their competitors out of the field, these companies can then use their monopoly status to gouge consumers they have heretofore coddled with unrealistically low prices. This sometimes goes by the name of "blitzscaling." But as Edward Ongweso details in a piece for Motherboard, it shows no sign of actually working.
In May, SoftBank revealed it had lost $13.2 billion overall last fiscal year, with the Vision Funds suffering a nearly $27 billion loss. Some of the largest hits came from its crown jewels: Its investments in Uber, DoorDash, Chinese ride-hail giant DiDi, and South Korean e-commerce Coupang, all plummeted, as well as previous investments on its books such as Alibaba and British semiconductor designer Arm. The company also warned of further losses, saying its Vision Funds had lost another $13 billion since the start of the new fiscal year on March 31.
As Ongweso explains, the failure can be attributed in part to the inherent untrustworthiness of the sociopathic and megalomaniacal executives required to execute such a strategy: It turns out they are just as happy to give money to themselves as they are to consumers in the pursuit of market-warping losses. The SoftBank strategy also typically relies on dubious or outright illegal labor relations that prove unsustainable, or the nonenforcement of existing antitrust legislation. Ongweso quotes Veena Dubal, who argues that with SoftBank-style investments, "you have large international investors who have funneled billions of dollars into these business models, and a core part of their logic was that the only way they were ever going to get any return on their investment is this effort to fundamentally restructure regulatory structures around work ... This was an investment in deregulation."
Presumably deregulation runs into some sort of limit, or the connection between regulation and monopoly is not what it seemed. Or perhaps investors have moved beyond the idea that you need to invest in companies that provide any sort of service at all to make money; instead you can straight-up gamble in rigged markets like crypto, or use capital to exit capitalism, as the "techno-feudalism" thesis that Evgeny Morozov discusses in this New Left Review essay proposes. From that perspective, SoftBank wasn't medieval enough in its long-game efforts to turn consumers into serfs. But is SoftBank's failure a sign that techno-feudalism is failing or succeeding?
In his essay, Morozov seems eager to debunk techno-feudalism on the grounds that it neglects the degree to which tech companies "accumulate via innovation" rather than dispossession and actually make things rather than simply extract rents extra-economically through forms of unnecessary intermediation and political coercion. "If today’s capitalists are mere lazy rentiers who contribute nothing to the production process, don’t they deserve to be downgraded to the status of feudal landlords?" Morozov asks, but he doesn't clarify what such downgrading would entail. Perhaps the danger is that we would mistakenly try to enact a bourgeois revolution all over again and be back where we started.
Techno-feudalism, in Morozov's account, is little more than a meme that muddles our understanding of the "digital economy," though I have to say his inconclusive tour through various Marxological debates on the precise meanings of "value" and "exploitation" and "extraction" wasn't especially clarifying for me. He suggests that tech company investments in research and development prove their commitment to useful innovation rather than more coercive means of capture, but I'm ultimately more convinced by his account of one of the thinker he is trying to debunk, Cédric Durand, who argues that, as Morozov puts it, "these massive investments fund the forces of predation rather than the forces of production."
In a rebuttal to Morozov, Jodi Dean evokes SoftBank to illustrate this: It funds gig economy companies that organize the production of services in ways that are worse for workers than before without meaningfully improving those services. They may become easier for consumers to access, but they become less profitable across the entire sector. Meanwhile workers' lives become even more precarious than under what used to be called late capitalism: "If feudalism was characterized by relations of personal dependence, then neofeudalism is characterized by abstract, algorithmic dependence on the platforms that mediate our lives." Think of it this way: You're not a serf but a small business owner!
Dean argues that SoftBank's blitzscaling reveals how "capital becomes a weapon of conquest and destruction." Its recent failures could be taken to mean that whole analysis is wrong. But it may suggest instead, as Ongweso seems to conclude, that capital has not yet become destructive enough, or worse that it has already found more efficient vectors of destructiveness. Web3 here we come!
This week at Real Life, Lauren Collee writes about fetishized circadian rhythms and tech-abetted attempts to feel in sync with others in "Temporal Belonging." Because of how we are supposedly saturated and alienated by the internet, "our relationship to the elusive flow of 'natural time' is presumed to be in crisis, just like our relationship to the wider 'natural world,'" Collee writes. But defining "natural time" is not as straightforward as it might seem: Is it a matter of coordinating with the sun and moon, with the behavior of animals (many of which are nocturnal), or with other people (who live in different places, in different relationships with the skies and their surroundings)? Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care about time?
Time, Collee notes, "is fundamentally relative," and the "real time" of ubiquitous connectivity has the effect of intensifying that, not resolving it. The sense that the internet has destroyed organic time and replaced it with machinic, always-on non-time has created a kind of nostalgia for clock time that manifests in fond remembrances of appointment television, or the fascination with Christian Marclay's film The Clock, a sequential supercut of clock references in films and TV shows. But as Collee points out, the clock was the original villain, forcing us into the regimented and standardized rhythms demanded by industrialization. (Clocks were "a symptom of a new Puritan discipline and bourgeois exactitude," as E.P. Thompson put it in his classic analysis "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism").
Another response to fragmented "real time" is the advent of apps that foreground social synchronization, like BeReal and Wordle. "The pacemaker-style app attempts to bring an experience of communality back to the highly individuated temporal flow of the online experience," Collee writes, "playing on nostalgia for an age when media had a more predictable temporal structure." These work on the Jeff Spicoli-esque insight that "if you're here and I'm here, doesn't that make it our time?" But they tend to be self-negating, in that the moment of collectivity evaporates into prolonged stretches of anticipation or indifference, in which one's idiosyncratic or isolated experience of time is heightened. The most acute response to overstimulation and information surfeit is not so much exhaustion as boredom, the most defiantly individualistic experience of time there can be.
The ultimate recourse for the concept of "natural time" is to refer to innate rhythms of bodies. The field of chronobiology, Collee explains, "tells us that our bodies possess an internal clock that is tuned ('entrained') by certain environmental stimuli, known as 'zeitgebers,' literally 'time-givers.'" Collee suggests that these notions mostly provide ideological succor: "The idea that our bodies are innately responsive to environmental phenomena is a comforting reminder that humans are still innately 'part of nature,'" and not wholly absorbed into digital existence. They can also distract us from the power relations inherent in the human experience of time (as Sarah Sharma's work makes clear): how some must adjust to the schedules of others, how some can turn time into capital, how some can waste time for the sheer pleasure of it. Time is only as real as the demand to set an alarm.