Chapter 4 digs deeper into the strategies and practices of the leading digital corporations of the present age, focussing on Alphabet/Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba and Tencent. Their function as ‘proprietary markets’ is identified as the heart of digital capitalism. The chapter begins with a more analytical perspective on the post-Second World War political economy, drawing on regulation theory and Wolfgang Streeck’s theory of democratic capitalism. The term ‘proprietary markets’ captures what sets the new digital accumulation regime apart from the Fordist and post-Fordist models that preceded it. While Fordism was about selling uniform mass products to unsaturated markets and post-Fordism shifted the focus to individualised products in more competitive markets, digital capitalism’s leading corporations have basically exited the competition game altogether by becoming the markets themselves. The chapter introduces a distinction between platforms per se and meta-platforms like Android or Amazon, which operate as markets for an ever-growing range of products and services. The latter’s strategies have ensured that it is almost impossible to access important markets without them. The chapter outlines how their expansion to date has relied on strategies such as ecosystem-building through mergers and acquisitions, and suggests that control of infrastructure will represent their main future growth strategy. This analysis is embedded in a theory of rent extraction: maintaining the digital infrastructures in question is often very cheap compared to the profits these companies extract from their position as owners of markets.

Chapter 3 takes up the links between digital technology and broader capitalist developments by exploring the systemic ties between financial capitalism and the digital economy. It starts with the direct interactions: the IT industry as the main supplier of technology used for ‘innovation’ in the financial sector (high-frequency trading, data-based asset management, etc.) and Wall Street as the main supplier of investment capital for the digital economy. The argument then turns to more indirect similarities and filiations. Both the banking sector and the internet industry deal, on an ontological level, with goods that are not scarce (to them). They make money by selling access to virtual goods that can be produced at very low cost. Banks create money by issuing credit essentially with a keystroke; internet companies distribute non-rival digital goods that they can multiply without relevant costs. This leads to similar business practices appearing in both fields. The chapter explores these in depth and frames them analytically, concluding that the most successful digital corporations owe their accumulation practices to role models in the financial sector. The chapter identifies venture capital as a specific type of financial capital that has been essential to the growth of digital capitalism. It explores its rise throughout the dotcom boom of the 1990s, analyses it as a strong driver of economic crisis and shows how the period after the financial and debt crisis of 2008/09 (roughly the past ten years) resembles the 1990s.

Social ecological economists have been present since the creation of the ISEE and have provided the main approach in the ESEE. This chapter frames the discussion about creating an alternative economics that gives insight into operationally effective alternative forms of economies. It looks at the rise of modern industrial economies. They are contrasted with a generalised category of ‘traditional economies’ based on differences in structure, although a richer analysis might employ a dialectical conceptualisation. The chapter outlines the roles of State and corporate actors in promoting technology, how work has become central to modern lives but without meaning, the related failures of development and its colonialism, and the disconnect between Nature and society. This is followed by outlining the related key problem areas facing social ecological economic research in the search for viable alternative systems of social provisioning and means of transformation away from current destructive and exploitative economic structures.

Trying to define a preanalytic vision as an explicit cognitive act is not an easy task and especially if the hope, as here, is to make this more comprehensive and extend from philosophy of science to ideology and axiology. Social ecological economics can be understood as in opposition to two paradigmatic positions, one constituted by economic growth and the other price-making markets. This chapter outlines the foundations in the natural sciences. It then turns to the overarching aims of economic science and the need to redefine them away from the orthodox goals of growth and efficiency, and towards social provisioning. This is followed by outlining four areas where social ecological economics develops interdisciplinary and heterodox thought: human behaviour; ethics and value; non-human Nature; and institutions. The chapter ends with a summary of positions that constitute social ecological economics in terms of ontology, epistemology, methodology, axiology and ideology.

Chapter 6 draws together the strands and proceeds towards theory-building. Looking for earlier forms of capitalist accumulation with relevant similarities, it employs historical studies and world system theory to capture digital capitalism’s operations as a privatised form of mercantilism. Historically, like today, mercantilism emerged as a strategy for a world without economic growth. In the two eras, mercantilism shares a vision of the global economy as a zero-sum game, using trade monopolies to obtain profit via market control. In both cases, the leading companies operate in global markets that exercise quasi-governmental authority. However, while classic mercantilism was ultimately a political operation with state-granted trade monopolies enriching absolutist rulers, the state today is the loser in many different ways. The chapter revisits the core themes of the preceding chapters (privatisation, financialisation, rent extraction, labour control, inequality) and embeds them in theory. In particular, it develops a theory of social conflict over digital capitalism. The argument is that the social formula implemented by digital capitalism’s leading corporations is an alliance of capital and consumers against labour. This creates role conflicts, as people are usually both consumers and workers. This, the chapter argues, makes social conflict over digital capitalism unlikely.

Chapter 7 concludes with a sketch of possible future trajectories. It returns to the introductory argument that digital capitalism represents a post-neoliberal economic practice, in the sense that its leading companies have jettisoned the idea of neutral markets (which is essential to every liberal theory of capitalism). The conclusion argues that the obvious attempts by the state to gain a more active role in the economy – especially in Europe – represent the flip side of this post-neoliberal constellation. It sketches out three possible scenarios for the future of digital capitalism: the existing Western path, where life chances are increasingly distributed as (digital) capitalist services; a political-authoritarian version of the type currently appearing in China, where life chances are distributed according to a logic of privilege for political conformity; and a third version which is characterised as a digital society based on rights.