Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek Interview: A Commentary

We consider the development of a technics of transition(s) to be a singularly important task for left actors today, in particular because the technical environment now enables various points of ingress which were previously absent.

– Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, The Speed of Future Thought

In my previous post I linked to C. Derick Varn’s blog post on The Speed of Future Thought where he reposted an interview he did on Northstar with Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek about their Accelerationsist Manifesto. Rereading the manifesto as well as the interview I’ve begun rethinking their project. To be honest I admire what they are trying to enact in their current project, yet I have issues that need to be resolved that deal mainly in the ideological framework within which they want to encapsulate it. First, as one reads the interview one comes upon what I perceive as a central summary of their main position in the manifesto:

Our overriding theory of change is one which is revolutionary in character without either being tied to the model of change via spectacular state-takeover, nor a secession or subtraction from the state. Instead it proposes we need to begin to think in terms of a technics of transition(s), identifying capitalism as a technology itself (both conceptual and employing technical systems) – and that therefore previous radical attempts to surmount this technical system have failed in part because they lacked the tools, and the intellectual resources to fully supplant it, to fully repurpose techniques, machines, and concepts in a way which enables a full phase transition towards a post-capitalist state of affairs. What they didn’t lack, and what we will also need, is of course popular and widespread mobilisation also. We consider the development of a technics of transition(s) to be a singularly important task for left actors today, in particular because the technical environment now enables various points of ingress which were previously absent. This entails establishing platforms for further transformations. For instance, basic income (if properly implemented) could drastically alter the labour-capital relationship by negating the forced quality of work. It could liberate leisure time for the pursuit of collective ends. And it could weaken the disciplinary aspects of the welfare state by making income unconditional. From this configuration of the social platform, all sorts of new options begin to open up.

– The Speed of Future Thought: Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek interviewed by C. Derick Varn and Dario Cankovich on July 15, 2013 on Northstar

As I read that first sentence it seems that their theory of change is more aligned to older forms of Progressivism than to any notion of ultra-left communism. This sense of neither State takeover, nor a total elimination of the State sounds like progressive change in reformism. What else could it be? In fact their next sentence they describe the need to rethink neoliberalism and change and see something new, to rethink capitalism in “terms of a technics of transition(s), identifying capitalism as a technology itself”. This aligns well with what Luis Suarez-Villa in his book Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism terms technocapitalism:

Technocapitalism is defined in this book as a new form of capitalism that is heavily grounded on corporate power and its exploitation of technological creativity. Creativity, an intangible human quality, is the most precious resource of this new incarnation of capitalism. Corporate power and profit inevitably depend on the commodification of creativity through research regimes that must generate new inventions and innovations. These regimes and the corporate apparatus in which they are embedded are to technocapitalism what the factory system and its production regimes were to industrial capitalism. The tangible resources of industrial capitalism, in the form of raw materials, production hardware, capital, and physical labor routines are thus replaced by intangibles, research hardware, experimental designs, and talented individuals with creative aptitudes. The generation of technology in this new era of capitalism is therefore a social phenomenon that relies as much on technical functionality as on the co-optation of cultural attributes.1

In fact Williams and Srinicek see this already in their first statement in the interview where they remind us that “what is interesting is that the neoliberal hegemony remains relatively impervious to critique from the standpoint of the latter, whilst it appears fundamentally unable to counter a politics which would be able to combat it on the terrain of modernity, technology, creativity, and innovation.” That’s because the ball has moved and the neoliberalist target has shifted in the past few years. The Left is stuck in waging a war it cannot win. What I mean by that is that it is at war with a target (neoliberalism) that no longer exists except in the facades of spectacle and illusion promoted in the vast Industrial-Media-Complex. What is going on in the world is now shifting toward the East and in new visions of technocapitalism of which such initiatives as Smart Cities by both CISCO (see here) and IBM and a conglomerate of other subsidiary firms and networking partners to build new 21st Century infrastructures and architectures to promote creativity, innovation, ultra-modernity, and technocapitalism.

Let’s face it capitalism is once again reinventing itself in a new guise and all the Foundations, Think-Tanks, academic, and media blitz hype artists are slowly pushing toward a different order than the older market economy of neoliberalism. So it’s time the Left begin addressing the new target and its ideological shift rather than attacking the boogeyman of capitalism’s past. Oh, true, the façade of neoliberalism will remain in the EU and U.S.A. and much of the rest of the world for a long while yet, so there is a need to continue our watchdog efforts on that score. But what I’m getting at is that we need to move forward and overtake this new agenda that is slowly creeping into the mix before it suddenly displaces any forms of resistance. So far I’m not sure if this new technocapitalistic ideology has even registered on the major leftist critiques beyond a few individuals like Luis Suarez-Villa. Mark Bergfield has a good critique of Suarez-Villa’s first book on Marx & Philosophy site: here.

Berger reminds us that a generation after Marx and Engels, his followers such as Bebel and Kautksy “would fall into ‘progressism’ and a version of techno-utopianism vis-à-vis economic determinism. Today, techno-utopianism is fashionable once again”. He remarks that Suarez-Villa “incites the reader to rethink Marx’s labour theory of value and the dialectical relationship of technology and capitalism”. He goes on to state:

This form of corporate power commodifies all our life-spheres and in particular people’s individual creativity. According to Marx, the crisis-ridden system would continuously seek to increase the rate of exploitation by either increasing the absolute rate of surplus value (i.e. making workers work longer and harder or paying them less for an hour of work). On the other hand, Marx also argued that capitalists would have to increase the relative rate of surplus value by introducing new machines and placing new non-commodified areas such as ‘creativity’ under the system of generalised commodity production.

One need not be reminded that a return to Marx’s writings from the Grundrisse to Capital is essential reading for anyone who purports to speak about communism with any sense of honesty. Many Marxist’s are coming to the conclusion that the 20th Century forms of communism failed because they followed revisionists rather than the original notions that Marx and Engels set out in their many books. Not that we must be slaves to the letter of Marxism or create some new orthodoxy which again would actually go against what they said and lived. No. We need new ideas, new ways of thinking through these changing times, but we need to glen the insights of those originals who still speak to us today!

Berger realizes that large parts of Villa-Suarez’s argument “will fall on deaf ears with Marxists. While his analysis remains limited in its achievements he raises pertinent questions. He might not have the answers but it can allow the kind of discussions which might arrive at them. In the context of debates amongst Autonomist-Marxists and the anti-capitalist left on the role of the “general intellect” Suarez-Villa adds some much-needed food for thought”.

That’s one of my issues, on the Left today there seems to be too much infighting, too much finger-pointing and ideological squabbling that goes nowhere but reminds our opponents of just how ineffectual our ideologies are and will have no impact on their ongoing projects. In fact, these capitalists would love it for us to implode and continue to squabble among ourselves, the more the merrier. Why? Because they know that without some form of unity and solidarity, some form of collective vision and voice we’re finished, we’re just disgruntled hate-mongers sitting in the wings spouting our slogans, our epithets, our bullshit which can never accomplish anything pragmatic and real in the world itself.

In a final summation of Villa-Suarez’s contribution Berger remarks:

Suarez-Villa’s greatest achievement is how he navigates beyond the crude cyber-utopianism of Clay Shirky or the technophobia of Eugene Morozov. Instead he embraces technological change while pointing towards its dark underbelly. This also holds true for his view on ‘social networks’. He ascribes to ‘social networks’ an immense creative potential and argues they provide the basis for human liberation. Yet, these same networks create new kinds of hierarchies and control mechanisms which industrial capitalism could have only dreamt of. He writes: “Their extent, structure, and access are largely articulated by those who participate in them. Such participation can become a means to dominate other network participants or it can become a vehicle to collapse hierarchies, oligarchies, and exploitive controls.”

On the right such proponents as Dinesh D Souza on Forbes, The Moral Limits of Wealth, as far back as 2000 tries to white-wash it all saying the “capitalism may have won the economic war, but that it hasn’t the moral one,” and, then goes on to add:

The egalitarian critique is a limited one, because it merely says that the blessings of capitalism are not being extended to all. A more fundamental criticism challenges the ethical basis of the system itself. This view holds that the very engine of techno-capitalism is greed and selfishness. We associate this argument with Karl Marx, but Saint Paul (and before him, Phocylides in the sixth century B.C.) got there first: “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Such right-wing Christian apologetics trying to slipshod Marx into the religious music of a new moral order seems a little out of place to this old Marxist. Even Zizek with his ethical Idealism and Hegelian-Lacanian world of lack and zero sum deficits seems like a fall into the abyss rather than something we can move forward with.

And, yet, here are Williams and Srnicek promoting a new manifesto for the Left that might push it beyond all this squabbling while at the same time co-opting the techno-futurist agendas of this new form of capitalism that Villa-Suarez describes so eloquently. But are they? Are they really promoting anything new? Isn’t their actual move between a Leninist take-over of the State, or the total escape hatch of Automist ideology of a withdrawal from the State, in actuality a return as stated to the Progressive Era Refomism of the 19th and early 20th Century dressed up in techno-futurist babble? The verdict may be out as of yet, we will have to see what the details are in the pudding. So far their conceptions of ‘planning’ are sketchy at best.

As my friend and cohort, Edmund Berger, of Deterritorial Investigations Unit said in a comment to a previous post on this:

Right off the bat, I like that the two take Land to task for his putting a franctic, sci-fi twist on what is essentially Hayek read the lens of a contorted interpretation of Anti-Oedipus. At the same time, I wouldn’t quite agree with their depiction of capitalist reality as “ho-hum.” If you’re middle class, fairly established, have property, functioning vehicles, no worries on food or the possibilities of devastating crisis, then sure, capitalism is ho-hum. But this social class is a vanishing minority – the great majority of us have lives that are anything that are ho-hum, full of worries and fears and sleepless nights. Beyond this, the precarious homeostasis of capitalism’s “lucky ones” is made possible by a vast military machine that overseas takes combat as its directive and at home surveillance; that requires massive public investment to maintain itself; that stockpiles arms of an unimaginable intentsity; that spreads across the earth as a virus; and that treats the masses like an insurgent in battlespace. In short, aside from the daily domination, exploitation, and regulation of the individual body, we have a social body (and I’m extending this to the global level) that is under a permanent state of emergency. Some time ago Andrew Culp posted a critique of Accelerationism that deemed it a resurrection of Proudhon’s insistence that there are “good” and “bad” forms of capitalism that can be separated from one another; Williams and Srnicek mirror this in their positive valorization of production processes and distribution technologies, and the body in laboring mode. But with capitalism being a litany of variations, an abstract machine, I’m not so optimistic that “post-capitalism” can emerge from the side of capitalism, if it is pierced in just the right way.

This carries over into their language of what a post-capitalism would look like. Just as the early technocrats of neoliberalism extolled the virtues of rationality in forming the system, Williams and Srnicek bandy this term about while insisting the superiority of planned economies. They are a little mum on the details of this – and who could blame them, as they obviously are trying to break with the legacy of collectivism while retaining its vital aspects. Who is planning? Is it the state? Should we still not be dealing with the issues of power and hierarchy, things that have stuck fatal blows to all the great revolutions of the past? Or is it participatory? Under a participatory system, I don’t the degree of organization and mediated distribution could take place. They mention CyberSyn, Allende’s fascinating cybernetic quasi-management system that allowed both centralized planning alongside distributed networks of worker autonomy and self-governance. Unfortunately, we never saw the fruits of this machine, as the neoliberal revolution kicked off right there with the coup by Pinochet. But at the same time, we should keep in mind that Allende’s system was, at the end of the day, far more Keynesian in nature than it was socialist, retaining the inner functions of the market proper and private property rights, augmenting them only with the seizure of land from foreign multinationals, price and wage controls, regulation, and a moderate redistributionn program in the form of social welfare. Allende’s approach was indicative of the ‘developmentalism’ that was the hallmark of Third World economies across the 60s and 70s – an alternative to socialism that was promoted by American through Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, and later by the Trilateral Commission’s interest in moderate unionism and social democracy. Developmentalism died two deaths, of course: first in the collapse of Allende’s experiment, and then when the Federal Reserve tripled interest rates at the end the 70s. Regardless, to cite Allende’s program is to not point past capitalism, to some notion of post-capitalism, but simply to work out the internal contradictions of the system while retaining its central components. This paradigm is at work in another influence Williams and Srnicek cite, Michael Albert’s ParEcon, which holds on to idea of monetary rewards for “socially-valued labor,” the eternal surveillance of the labor process itself, and other capitalist components alongside a succession of worker’s councils and self-governing of labor principles. This, to me, reads a lot more like the co-operatives and collectives that function within capitalism, as opposed to against it.

He hits the nail on the head. This sense that their project will actually retain the technics of capitalism without its ideology is my take as well. Williams and Srnicek say as much in the interview when they state:

Instead it [Accelerationist Manifesto] proposes we need to begin to think in terms of a technics of transition(s), identifying capitalism as a technology itself (both conceptual and employing technical systems) – and that therefore previous radical attempts to surmount this technical system have failed in part because they lacked the tools, and the intellectual resources to fully supplant it, to fully repurpose techniques, machines, and concepts in a way which enables a full phase transition towards a post-capitalist state of affairs. (my italics)

This notion of supplanting it through a repurposing of capitalisms ‘techniques, machines, and concepts’ seems to be in some ways just what the early progressives were doing through the administrations of Teddy Roosevelt on through Woodrow Wilson. Obviously there is no one to one alignment of the two methodologies and ideologies, but the idea of transitions(s) implies something of a telos, a progression, yes? Isn’t this the central tenet of progressivism? That it is a movement of continuous improvement, transition, and change? Yet, there are differences as well. At the heart of the progressive era reformism was an ideology of Social Justice. Do we see this in Williams and Srnicek? What they tells us is a little different, speaking of a difference with Gramscian notions of hegemony and society, they tell us:

While civil society (and ‘culture’ more broadly) is evidently an important political battleground, any understanding of what hegemony is today must entail a far broader conception: in essence, the ability to configure the social possibility space, the space on which politics itself occurs. For us, this means more than simply normative or ideological claims, but will also include technological systems (i.e. above all else infrastructures of different kinds). This is why we believe it isn’t enough even to have massive populist movement against the current forms of capitalism. Without a new approach to things such as economics, production and distribution technologies, and labour practices, a ‘radical’ left will always find itself warped back into capitalistic practices.

So this notion of ‘space’ seems an influx from such writers as Gaston Bachelard and his pupil, Henri Lefebvre whose ideas of the social production of space have recently become of interest of many globalist critiques. Sociologist like Saskia Sassen in books like Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages have outlined and incorporated Lefebvre’s ideas on space and social production. In this book she attempts to capture the complex logic and consequences of capitalist expansion on a global scale as an epochal process. Sassen’s focus is on the historical transitions that moved the world from the medieval era to the national era and then to the global era, and how territory and political community have been organized and restructured along the way. As G. John Ikenberry states it: “Most interesting is the observation that the current stage of globalization is shifting the locus of authority away from states to a “world of private power” that nonetheless still operates through national institutions. Underlying these observations is a materialistic theory of capitalism; nationalism, democracy, and geopolitics are mostly absent.” (see Foreign Affairs review)

Also Williams and Srnicek hint at a pluralistic society in that “Our alternative is not that there should be a single organisation doing the long-term thinking, or that all organisations ought to be doing so – instead a ‘healthy’ political ecosystem will feature a kind of division of labour between different kinds of organisations, with different kinds of structures and interests.” This almost sounds like what many of the newer era anarchists have been struggling toward for years. I think of such thinkers as Murray Bookchin and his Libertarian Municipalism: Libertarian municipalism uses the strategy of dual power to create a situation in which two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—cannot coexist. Lenin was the first to instigate such a theory-practice, but Libertarian socialists have more recently appropriated the term to refer to the non-violent strategy of achieving a libertarian socialist economy and polity by means of incrementally establishing and then networking institutions of direct participatory democracy to contest the existing power structures of state-capitalism. In this context, the strategy itself is sometimes also referred to as “counterpower” to differentiate it from the term’s Leninist origins.

Again, though this is an alternative, I do not think this is what Williams and Srnicek have in mind. But what exactly do they have in mind? It’s not at all clear as of yet. In fact they realize this and tell us: “What is missing to tie these together is a broad ideological vision. And just as with the right, the important thing about such a vision is not that it be necessarily coherent, but that on a material basis it works, that it has a kind of efficacy in conducting action and conjoining political entities together in virtuous cycles of feedback.” Yet, without some actual description of the system in question, without a plan in their words, a book or pamphlet outlining the broad aspects of this ideological vision how will this ever get off the ground? Are we to assume that there will be some structured effort to assemble an assemblage of people to iron out the details? And, who would be invited to the party? Who’s plan is it anyway? The way the Left works now I’d hardly see any kind of friendly peace ceremonies of leftists singing in the streets and putting down their current ideological blinkers and coming together at some new International to work out their differences. Didn’t Trotsky offer that in another age? Did it work then? No. Could it work now… your guess is as good as mine. I’m a little cynical as that goes, but hey we have to start somewhere. Maybe their right, but we want know unless we all get together and show our colors, make the hard decisions that need to be made to move forward.

Most of all we would need a base. Any base means a foundation. And I don’t mean in the philosophical sense of foundation. No. I mean Foundation(s): economic foundation, those individuals on the Left like Soros and others who have worked within the system and have the necessary power, money, capital to afford Think-Tanks where Leftist individuals can hash this out and come up with a plan… but, wait a minute, is this really the path we want to take? Foundations, Think-Tanks, Committees, Assemblies, …. on and on… Stop! Exactly what do Williams and Srnicek mean when they tells us in the Accelerationist Manifesto:

(20) To achieve each of these goals, on the most prac­tical level we hold that the ac­cel­er­a­tionist left must think more ser­i­ously about the flows of re­sources and money re­quired to build an ef­fective new polit­ical in­fra­struc­ture. Beyond the ‘people power’ of bodies in the street, we re­quire funding, whether from gov­ern­ments, in­sti­tu­tions, think tanks, unions, or in­di­vidual be­ne­factors. We con­sider the loc­a­tion and con­duc­tion of such funding flows es­sen­tial to begin re­con­structing an eco­logy of ef­fective ac­cel­er­a­tionist left organizations.

So, okay, whoosh… this is it, yes, I was on the right track, they are working the system just like any good old capitalist would, even Soros himself does as much: “… whether from gov­ern­ments, in­sti­tu­tions, think tanks, unions, or in­di­vidual be­ne­factors. We con­sider the loc­a­tion and con­duc­tion of such funding flows es­sen­tial to begin re­con­structing an eco­logy of ef­fective ac­cel­er­a­tionist left organizations.” So much like Bookchin’s social ecology of organizations they too will need an influx of capital, funding, for what they foresee as a reconstruction project for the left as it develops an new and improved accelerationist left ideology.

Now a part of their new accelerationist turn in ideology seems to still include the Enlightenment project in some form or fashion since Reason or what they term the ‘rational way’ is central to it:

…from our own belief that a planned system can distribute goods and resources in a more rational way than the market system. This differs from previous experiments with such a system in rejecting both the techno-utopian impulse of much recent writing on post-capitalism, and the centralised nature of the Soviet system.

In the original manifesto they put it this way:

Technology and the so­cial are in­tim­ately bound up with one an­other, and changes in either po­ten­tiate and re­in­force changes in the other. Whereas the techno-​utopians argue for ac­cel­er­a­tion on the basis that it will auto­mat­ic­ally over­come so­cial con­flict, our po­s­i­tion is that tech­no­logy should be ac­cel­er­ated pre­cisely be­cause it is needed in order to win so­cial conflicts.

The subtle difference between capitalist techno-utopians and techno-socialists seems to be on the distinction between the sense of a view of technological determinism (“auto­mat­ic­ally over­come so­cial con­flict”), and the non-deterministic intervention into the social matrix of an eventual or political struggle that is open and still to be determined (“tech­no­logy should be ac­cel­er­ated pre­cisely be­cause it is needed in order to win so­cial conflicts”). Technology is central to both systems, but on the left we see the human element of a determination still to be decided and determined in the social area of events, the matrix of historical materialism itself.

Williams and Srnicek also tell us there are two tendencies within left politics as it is situated in discourses surrounding the digital worlds of the internet that will need to be fended off:

The first is naïve techno-utopianism, privileging the new in itself. There’s nothing inherently progressive about novelty, and there’s no reason to think technology will supersede political conflicts. Instead it has to be recognized that any new technology can be employed as a weapon in these conflicts.

The second tendency to avoid is the reduction of politics to internet issues. While open sources, freedom of information, and privacy in the face of big data are all significant issues, there is nevertheless a large group of internet activists for whom these issues become the totality of politics.

I agree that technology is a two-edged sword as we’ve seen in its uses by DARPA, Google, and other government and private initiatives not only in the U.S. but around the world. The second is this ingroup world of the digital activist who sometimes forget the internet is a medium that for much of the planet is neither accessible nor even understood. After reading Arundhati Roy’s recent Capitalism: A Ghost Story I feel that for most of the victims of capitalism and the free-market system of neoliberalism the internet is just another part of the problem rather than a solution:

While intrusive surveillance, Internet policing, and phone tapping and the clampdown on those who speak up becomes grimmer with every passing day, it’s odd how India is becoming the dream destination of literary festivals. There are about ten of them scheduled over the next few months. Some are funded by the very corporations on whose behalf the police have unleashed their regime of terror. The Harud Literary Festival in Srinagar (postponed for the moment) was slated to be the newest, most exciting one—“as the autumn leaves change colour the valley of Kashmir will resonate with the sound of poetry, literary dialogue, debate and discussions . . .” Its organizers advertised it as an “apolitical” event but did not say how either the rulers or the subjects of a brutal military occupation that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, bereaved thousands of women and children, and maimed a hundred thousand people in its torture chambers can be “apolitical.” I wonder—will the literary guests come on tourist visas? Will there be separate ones for Srinagar and Delhi? Will they need security clearance? Will a Kashmiri who speaks out go directly from the festival to an interrogation center, or will she be allowed to go home and change and collect her things? (I’m just being crude here, I know it’s more subtle than that.)2

One only has to surf the web to discover all the hype around travel which is one of the growing industries that cater to the New Elite. Even the green movement has entered this arena with Green travel to exotic worlds of the Amazon, Congo, China, New Zeland… where people can visit tribal and indigenous cultures in their own settings: a  travelogue for the bored elite where the indigenous peoples of the planet have been caged in a primitive zoo to sell their exotic trinkets to rich Westerners. Is this the new decadence of the west?

At the end of the interview they return to the State as key:

We need to begin from what we know about power. Politics, for all the transformations of the spatiality of power, remains deeply imbricated with the nation state. … Globally spreading ideas must localise at the level of the state, as well as at the level of the local. The history of neoliberalism demonstrates the use of key states as hubs within the establishment of broader networks of power. … While the nation state is (highly) problematic, in particular for the global dynamic of international competition which generates immensely perverse problems, this does not mean that it can be ignored.

From the original manifesto we realize how Williams and Srnicek envision a return of the Progressive agenda of Reformism with three basic goals:

First, we need to build an in­tel­lec­tual in­fra­struc­ture. Mimicking the Mont Pelerin Society of the neo­lib­eral re­volu­tion, this is to be tasked with cre­ating a new ideo­logy, eco­nomic and so­cial models, and a vision of the good to re­place and sur­pass the ema­ci­ated ideals that rule our world today.

Second, we need to con­struct wide-​scale media re­form.

Third, we need to re­con­sti­tute various forms of class power. Such a re­con­sti­t­u­tion must move beyond the no­tion that an or­gan­ic­ally gen­er­ated global pro­let­ariat already ex­ists. Instead it must seek to knit to­gether a dis­parate array of par­tial pro­let­arian iden­tities, often em­bodied in post-​Fordist forms of pre­carious labour.

So the basic foundation consist of reforming the state form within, thereby building a new intellectual infrastructure, based on a wide-scale media reform and a new sense of class consciousness. To achieve this they proposed the notion of a “Promethean politics of max­imal mas­tery over so­ciety and its en­vir­on­ment is cap­able of either dealing with global prob­lems or achieving vic­tory over cap­ital”.

Talk of ‘mastery’ seems a little dated to me, a throwback to Nietzscheism and an anti-naturalism toward Nature and Society based on hierarchical notions rather than egalitarian ones. But I’ll let the wary reader discern that for herself, and leave it at that… I let the reverberation of that quote from the beginning to reverberate in your mind: “We consider the development of a technics of transition(s) to be a singularly important task for left actors today, in particular because the technical environment now enables various points of ingress which were previously absent.”

1. Luis Suarez-Villa. Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism (Kindle Locations 51-56). Kindle Edition.
2. Roy, Arundhati (2014-04-14). Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Kindle Locations 762-771). Haymarket Books. Kindle Edition.