Book Review: Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis, by Dan Schiller

Digital Depression: Information Technology and Economic Crisis. Dan Schiller. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 361 pp. $95 hbk. $28 pbk.Digital Depression is the most recent book exploring the political economy of information by Dan Schiller, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science and the Department of C ommunication at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. I have to say Schiller has outdone himself this time. As a careful historian, Schiller always provides a comprehensive set of bibliographic notes in support of his claims about how well-placed observers understood critical events and relationships at particular points in time. While his earlier book, Digital Capitalism, covered some of the same ground, that ground has not only shifted, it has become far more convoluted, and the networks that have emerged to service, observe, and control it have multiplied, merged, and evolved in unimaginable ways. As a result, this most recent book has 100 pages of notes, while his previous set of reflections only required 66.Following his brief introduction, Schiller has organized his assault on this complexity into three parts. The first, "Digital Capitalism's Ascent to Crisis," contains four chapters, each of which is focused on a particular set of relationships between digital networks and critical subsystems involving labor, commodity chains, financialization, and militarization. Part II, "The Recomposition of Communications," takes a somewhat different approach, but adds consideration of services and applications and sponsorship to an assessment of commodity chains in the context of an expanded commercialized Internet. It is in this segment that contradictory patterns of growth in the context of global depression are framed as a theoretical challenge. It is in Part III, "Geopolitics and Social Purpose," that Schiller turns his attention to questions of governance with regard to domestic and international regulation and management of the network-based global information system. It is here that Schiller puts on an amazing performance juggling his well-placed emphasis on the role of the U.S. policy system, with the need to take note of changes taking place within the European community, and the rapidly rising power and influence being exercised on a global scale by government and corporate actors in China and India.At the heart of Schiller's engagement with a system that he describes as being in continuous crisis in the face of maldistributed growth is this notion of commodity chains. Schiller credits world systems theorists Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein with providing an alternative to the mainstream concept of the "value chains" as introduced by Michael Porter. As Schiller suggests, it is through its determination to follow the social relationships involved in the mobilization and profitable exploitation of labor power that value chain analysis helps us to identify changes, contradictions, and conflicts within the global capitalist economy. Because of its emphasis on the role of productive labor, the role of digital information technology in the workplace is given its due. However, because of its transformation at a global scale, the role of digital networks in coordinating production, distribution, marketing, and financing, almost without regard to location, has actually become more important than relations with labor per se. The globalization of the automotive production system is used as an illustration of how networked commodity chains have worked to ensure that in the United States, at least, "secure union jobs with benefits and pensions . …