Intangible goods have always been, until now, a very difficult commodity to trade. In a world characterized by consumerism, in a large part of which, like this country, even the stated contracts are not respected, but written ones, even if on a napkin, the transfer of intangible, not material, goods was a difficult struggle. How will we communicators know about it!

The ‘war’ between Musk and Zuckerberg has begun, Twitter threatens to sue Met over the new Threads platform

But the world has changed, technology has not stopped growing until now in the 21st century, at an unprecedented speed, and as I write this article, I am looking at another one of the multiscreens that record my everyday life as a legal battle between Mark Zuckerberg, the boy genius of Facebook, now called Meta, and Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, for controlling an audience that has until now been a voracious consumer of political-economic-judicial intangibles, mostly on the most convulsive microblogging platform. : Twitter. Well, hang on, because Threads was just born in the cradle of Facebook, which, it seems, would paint a very direct competition.

Threads started causing problems for Instagram users because it was born tied to the new Meta network

Surprise? No, not at all. Process, evolution, transcendence are perhaps more appropriate terms. In 2018, five years ago, the Canadian thinker Nick Srnicek warned about this in his book platform capitalismwhich he admits has the Marxist inspiration of industrial capitalism.

Professor of digital economics at the prestigious King’s College in London, Srniček believes, and it seems that we are seeing right now, that capital has turned to data in order to regain its vitality, after the long and repeated crises that it had to experience in the commercialization of material goods, those that can be held in store, put at home or carry in your pocket. And as it takes shape platform capitalism It is based on the accumulation model embodied by Microsoft, General Electric, Google, Facebook, Apple, AirBnb or Uber, among others.

The raw material of this “21st century capitalism” or “platform capitalism” is data.

Raw material? In this new capitalism, it is no longer cut with a machete or piled in silos or racks. Less is extracted from the ground by large oil rigs for conversion into plastics or chemicals. The raw material of this “21st century capitalism” or “platform capitalism” is data. Yes, yours, mine, the ones that bring infinite exploration and even more infinite social interactions, which can’t possibly avoid the most efficient extraction device the human mind has yet created: digital platforms, operated from a hammock or next to a ping-pong table and that many years later they are still in a legal battle with the authors of the absorbing content, whether or not to pay them for their intellectual exhaustion.

The train wreck between Zuckerberg and Musk will allow us to watch them straddle the fine line between the technology the former allegedly endorsed in Threads, which the latter bought in a controversial transaction with Twitter, just as the little bluebird economic boom, when Musk started charging high fees for existence and interaction. Take the stage (OR)