INTRODUCTION

Free markets, the power of finance and the general deregulation of the economy across the globe has led to the growing power of monopolies. Digital corporations provide a good illustration of this tendency in action. Take Snapchat. Like many big tech companies, Snapchat expends a considerable amount of money on acquisitions. In 2017, it spent an estimated $352.4 million on acquiring other companies, which was five times more than in 2016, and over six years up until 2017 it had purchased around twenty-four companies (Heath 2017). Snapchat's rationale in extending its reach through these acquisitions is its desire to bridge the gap between software and hardware by entering a variety of marketplaces. In 2017, Snapchat was also floated on the stock market with a market valuation of $28.3 billion. Evan Spiegel, one of the founders, made $5 billion from this floatation. Spiegel and his other co-founder of Snapchat, Bobby Murphy, own all of the ‘C’ shares of Snapchat, which carry most voting rights. The New York Post dubs this practice, ‘Silicon Valley CEO authoritarianism’ (Trugman 2017), while for the Financial Times it shows a glaring lack of corporate governance and accountability in major digital media companies (Plender 2017). So, Snapchat not only demonstrates the monopolistic tendencies of tech companies, and how they guard their power closely even when floating their companies on financial markets, but also the broader point that finance is a vital channel in furthering the expansionist ambitions of capital (Lapavitsas 2013: 201).

This chapter maps out in more detail some of the broader changes and impacts that neoliberalism, financialisation and digital media have made in society and on class relations. The discussion will not only extend, at a more concrete level of analysis, the account of social class provided in Chapter 3, it will also provide a necessary backdrop to the consideration of productive and unproductive digital work and digital labour in the chapters that follow. In particular, we will see in this chapter that the incessant thirst for profits across the globe has driven some corporations, particularly digital corporations, to take on a financialised form.