Philipp Staab: The crises of digital capitalism
Channel: Alexander von Humboldt Institut for internet and society
Date: 2020-05-04

For around 50 years, digital technologies have been the key to economic transformation. However, it is only since the late 1990s that we have begun to see the emergence of a genuinely digital capitalism with the commercial Internet at its core. Leading digital companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are assuming a key position for ever larger parts of the economy. They have not only survived periodic crises of capitalism unscathed, but have even grown from them. At the present time, when the acute crisis of public health is about to turn into a socio-economic crisis of the global economy, it is therefore necessary to ask: What is digital capitalism? How are digitalisation and socio-economic crises related? And: What can we learn from this about a post-Corona world?


Philipp Staab is Professor of “Sociology of the Future of Work” at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF). As a sociologist he deals with the topics of technology, work, political economy and social inequality. In his research in recent years, he has focused on the leading companies of the commercial Internet such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent, as well as various start-ups.



Making Sense of the Digital Society
The current rapid pace of technological change creates enormous uncertainties – and thus the need for explanations that help us better understand our situation and shape the future. The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) are therefore continuing the Lecture Series Making Sense of the Digital Society that was launched in 2017. The aim of the format is to develop a European perspective on the current processes of transformation and its societal impact. The first speaker of this year’s series was the Philosopher Sybille Krämer.

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