ABSTRACT

This article argues that contemporary leading global corporations are intellectual monopolies that base their power on the systematic concentration (and predation) of knowledge which they turn into intangible assets. By monopolizing access to portions of society’s knowledge, these companies’ capacity to plan portions of capitalism exceeds their legally owned assets. The article defines each intellectual monopoly’s sphere of planning as a corporate production and innovation system that may include several substructures, from global value chains to platforms. Inside corporate production and innovation systems, value and knowledge production are organized and controlled by the intellectual monopoly. Moreover, among intellectual monopolies, those centralizing big data and the machine learning algorithms required to process them will develop greater planning capacities and a further self-expansion of their intellectual monopoly. The emergence of intellectual monopolies has implications for every level within capitalism, including global capital accumulation, effects on labour and peripheries. By briefly referring to these dimensions, the article finishes by presenting a depiction of the geographies of digital capitalism as an era dominated by intellectual monopolies.

摘要

本文认为，当代领先的全球公司是知识垄断企业，它们的权力建立在知识的系统集中（和掠夺）之上，这些知识转化为无形资产。通过垄断对部分社会知识的访问，这些公司规划部分资本主义的能力超过了它们合法拥有的资产。这篇文章将每个知识垄断的规划范围定义为一个企业生产和创新系统，它可能包括几个子结构，从全球价值链到平台。在企业生产和创新系统内部，价值和知识生产是由知识垄断组织和控制的。此外，在知识垄断中，那些集中大数据和处理它们所需的机器学习算法将发展更大的规划能力并进一步自我扩展他们的智力垄断。知识垄断的出现对资本主义的各个层面都有影响，包括全球资本积累、对劳动力和周边地区的影响。通过简要提及这些维度，文章最后将数字资本主义的地理描述为一个由知识垄断主导的时代。