Introduction

Each of the next four chapters examines one particular economic model within the digital economy by focusing on a single case (two in Chapter 9). The cases covered are some of the most successful undertakings in the digital economy – Apple, Wikipedia, Google search, Facebook and YouTube. They are significant as individual cases because of the scale of their use and the scale of their influence on the digital economy, but they are also significant as examples of models that are or could be more widely adopted in the digital economy, and indeed to some extent beyond it. They are studies, ultimately, not of specific organisations or websites, but rather of complexes of appropriative practices. While these cases are unrepresentative, not least by virtue of all being large and successful, the purpose of these chapters is not to be representative but to illustrate some cases and briefly consider how widely they might generalise. In each case, I will seek to identify specific appropriative practices, how they are combined in the case concerned and others like it, and how these complexes lead to certain characteristic patterns of appropriation of economic benefits. Some of the appropriative practices theorised here may not have been described in a similar way before, but most have been discussed by other writers. What is novel in this book's approach is not the identification of new practices but the creation of a framework that allows us to explain economic outcomes by examining how these practices interact. This is not to say that no scholars have ever done so before, but rather to argue that this, rather than an obsessive focus on the dubious concepts of surplus value or market equilibrium, is how to study the economy, and to demonstrate the kind of analysis that results.

The case examined in this particular chapter is thoroughly conventional in the sense that it is a large-scale capitalist business, indeed as of mid-2015 Apple is the largest company by market capitalisation in the world (Forbes, 2015). It is a strongly profit-oriented public company, and makes a significant share of its profits by selling manufactured goods.