Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

Based on a multi-year study of a ‘smart’ health technology undergoing commercialization, in this paper we approach assetization as a way of grappling with the ontological multiplicity of digital health data, and reflect on the value of assetization as a contested but essential design activity.

Paper long abstract:

Assets are increasingly appreciated as defining forms of contemporary digital economies. The assetization of digital health data in particular relies on complex technoscientific arrangements and diverse values and valuation processes. Recent contributions in Science and Technology Studies and other allied fields have emphasized the role that expectations play in prioritizing some values over others. Less apparent, however, is how the generation of digital data, and the values conflicts they implicate, are resolved through technology design and development practices in the context of commercialization activities. Drawing on findings from a multi-year study of a hospital-developed artificial intelligence-enabled ‘smart’ health technology undergoing commercialization through a start-up, in this paper we approach assetization as a way of grappling with the ontological multiplicity of digital health data. We describe values present in technology design, development, and use, and the techniques, infrastructures, and other objects implicated in the enclosure of different forms of assetizable value. We briefly reflect on the value of assetization itself as a contested but essential design and marketing activity, and conclude with implications for academic digital health commercialization efforts, asking what kinds of health systems they rely on to succeed. In doing so, we contribute to discussions regarding the role of digital technologies themselves in digital health economies, and relatedly, how different value forms are transformed into accountable relations.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how the rents users pay through their data are relevant not only for the digital platforms which they access, but also for the hardware companies which manufacture smart devices. In the case of hardware producers, worth is derived equally from retail prices and from data rents.

Paper long abstract:

The move from commodities to assets has been well documented in a variety of socio-economic areas ranging from the housing market (Aalbers 2017) to pharmaceutics patents (Bourgeron and Geiger, 2022). Furthermore, it has often been shown that this process lies at the heart of financialized capitalism more broadly (Langley, 2021). In this paper, I build on recent works about the specificities and different forms of data assetization (Sadowski 2019, Birch and Cochrane, 2021) and argue for the need to also reflect further on the relation between data rents and hardware production. To examine this further, I focus on smart technologies which are incorporated in any connected device, like the sensing appliances in our home. These are theoretically interesting objects, as they simultaneously represent commercialised goods and data extracting assets.

To illustrate, a smart fridge much like its non-digital counterpart, is a commodity with physical, positional and imaginative worth (Beckert 2011). However, importantly, the smart fridge is also monitoring its owner and extracting data regarding their patterns of consumption, energy usage, and home address; it can also get new features in time. In this respect, the smart fridge is a data-generating asset for the company which manufactured and sold it.

Data rents paid on various platforms are typically associated with a lack of ownership and with open access policies (Srnicek, 2016). By examining the business model behind smart devices, I shed light on a different dimension of rents paid through data as co-existing with, rather than replacing the exchange of commodities.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

We explore two initiatives to embed ‘Natural Capital’ in public and private sector decisions, where techno-economic logics are already well-embedded. Both initiatives reflect concerns about assetization but we speculate they may also help open up to other ways of relating to and working with nature.

Paper long abstract:

Here we explore alternative articulations of ‘Natural Capital’ and analyse their likely consequences for reinforcing or disrupting assetization. We do this by highlighting two examples, the ‘Natural Capital Protocol (NCP)’, and ‘Enabling a Natural Capital Approach (ENCA)’. These two examples derive from and are targeted at different institutional contexts - respectively the private and public sector - but both of which are already significantly dominated by economic logics.

Both initiatives, through their terminology and through their practices, encourage a view of the environment as an asset for human actors, providing a variety of goods and services. They clearly align with assetization in and as a governing practice. However, the initiatives also seek to broaden the set of concerns and considerations considered relevant and legitimate in decision-making. In particular, the NCP seeks to shift the set of issues considered within their scope, and avoid reductionist approaches to complexity. ENCA more overtly conforms with existing dominant institutional logics; but may perhaps may help ‘open up’ to other concepts and practices in the longer-term.

Work with these initiatives is unfolding, so further research is required to appraise their uptake and consequences; not only in terms of specific decisions (i.e. in how they promote nature and people’s multiple relationships within it), but also how individuals and institutions involved may be affected. This raises questions about the merits of incremental versus more disruptive approaches to achieve change for sustainability, given the techno-economic institutional logics that already dominate much professional decision-making in the Global North.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Using ethnography and archival research this paper aims to trace the historical process of assetization using two modernizing projects that started at the end of 19th century in the Romanian Principalities to reveal a techno-economic lock-in that reverberates to the present day.

Paper long abstract:

"Land becomes a strategic asset under climate change, which also means erosion, desertification”, this is an excerpt from the daily newspaper of the Romanian Orthodox Church, The Light [in rom. Lumina]. The peculiar article discusses how good land can be a competitive advantage in the coming years due to climate threats. Since when is the church interested in assets? Using ethnography and archival research I trace the process of assetization (Birch and Muniesa, 2020) and its naturalization as an affective-cognitive fixation and techno-political lock-in.

The paper reveals the technical and political entanglements between two modernizing projects that started in the second half of the 19th century, in the Romanian Principalities: The First Agrarian Reform (1864) and the First Rural Credit Society (1873). The former aimed to grant land ownership to the peasants, the latter was set up to finance and consolidate large estates affected by reform and threatened by mounting debts. Both are crucial in understanding the activation of land as an asset from a historical perspective in this part of Eastern Europe, in contrast with land as a fictitious commodity à la Karl Polanyi (1944) in the West.

Finally, my paper aims to shed light on the complex dynamics between the historical roots of assetization, socio-economic blockage and environmental threats, adding an ethnographic perspective on the present day land use in a village, in Southern Romania, threatened by the advance of mobile sands, desertification and big financial players.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores whether emerging markets in generative AI can disrupt big tech's assetization practices and break techno-economic lock-ins.

Paper long abstract:

We live in a society where surveillance has become a twenty-first-century culture and the common good no more than an imaginary (Stoddart, 2021). Over the last two decades, tech companies have created a new ‘normal’ whereby data have become dispossessed from its owners, gathered in highly creative ways (Geiger and Gross, 2021; Zuboff, 2019) and sold for significant profits on the market (Birch, Cochrane and Ward, 2021). Big tech’s surveillance capitalist practices and monopolistic positions have created asymmetries in market power and techno-economic lock-ins (Birch and Bronson, 2022; Zuboff, 2019). Start-up businesses are often said to have no choice but to become part of the surveillance culture (Stoddart, 2021; Zuboff, 2019) and consumers cannot fight the choiceless created in and through digital markets (Dholakia et al, 2021; Sahota, 2020). Despite repeated calls for data justice (Dencik et al, 2022; Taylor, 2017), increasingly stringent regulation (e.g. GDPR) and significant fines - the big 5 received combined fines of €3.04bn in 2023 (Koch, 2024)- the powerful position of big tech has become increasingly difficult to dislodge. In many experts’ view, this tendency will only be exacerbated with the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) becoming a pivotal market technology. Against this pessimistic intuition, the current paper examines if and how the recent launch and proliferation of generative AI presents a unique opportunity to in fact challenge the techno-economic lock-ins created in and by data assetization. Can data be ‘freed’ by AI technologies, and can data justice principles be baked into emerging AI markets? We endeavour to present tentative answers to these questions by using a multi-method qualitative research method (Gross and Geiger, 2023) – a document analysis (grey and policy literature), 18 semi-structured interviews (with AI experts, policy experts, NGOs, and advocacy groups) and selected ethnographic insights. In this empirical work, we address the following questions: What are the assetization practices of AI companies? What impact is AI making and doing when it comes to transforming surveillance capitalism? and What can be done to build more moral data markets?

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The presentation explores corporate tactics used by Pfizer, Gilead Science and Moderna to restrain alternative models of science and maximize the potential earning capacity of their ownership over specific technological assets in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

During the COVID-19 global pandemic, dynamics of assetization of health products (Roy 2020) transformed vaccine production and procurement into a game of vaccine nationalism, in which higher income countries pay more to jump the queue and obtain more vaccines to the detriment of other nations (Katz et al. 2021). Vaccine nationalism allowed drug companies to maximize their earning-capacity by coercing countries and impose prices or specific demands in exchange for their vaccine shipment, something some authors qualified as “state capture” – the concept of a corporation having the ability to manipulate the actions of the state (Gorodensky and Kohler 2022).

Many organizations argued in favor of making vaccines against pandemics a global public good (Hunter et al. 2022), but drug companies fought tooth and nail to preserve their earning-capacity through different forms of ownership over patents, clinical data, and technology.

Covid-19 created an opportunity for the emergence of a different model of health science based on public funding, open science and patent pooling. However, the model of proprietary science based on the assetization of health products in times of pandemics came out unscathed of this episode, to the detriment of vaccine equity, better efficiency in tackling the pandemic, and public trust in science.

The presentation explores corporate tactics used by Pfizer, Gilead Science and Moderna to restrain alternative models of science and maximize the potential earning capacity of their ownership over specific technological assets in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

I show how the UK government has overhauled NHS genetic testing services to enable the aggregation and exploitation of DNA data, following a logic of assetisation. I will explore tensions between assetisation and the healthcare goals of the NHS, by focusing on the risks of techno-economic lock-in.

Paper long abstract:

In this talk, I show how the commitment of the British Government and NHS England to a logic of assetisation has resulted in DNA (and other patient) data becoming regarded as a key resource to foster the bioeconomy. This is especially clear in their genomics strategy and the implementation of NHS England’s Genomic Medicine Service (GMS) since 2018. Here, I analyse how this commitment to assetisation has been translated in the transformation and overhaul of NHS England’s genetic testing services into the GMS.

I discuss how a vision of assetisation and platformisation emerged in the 2000s and 2010s and how genomic and wider NHS data were reframed as an asset that can be aggregated by standardising and centralising NHS services. Then I will show how this vision has been translated into a new infrastructure for the genetic testing services through what was called the 100,000 Genomes Project, which laid the foundations of the current GMS. In this new infrastructure, the services are centralised and standardised to enable the production and aggregation of genomic data in a database operated by Genomics England, a government owned company. Genomics England controls the access to this database and is tasked to leverage it to stimulate research and the bioeconomy. My analysis will explore tensions between assetisation and the healthcare goals of the GMS, especially by focusing on the risks of techno-economic lock-in for the GMS and the NHS in general.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Known as a “mining country” in commodity markets, Peru has gone through different legal frameworks of mineral extraction since the mid-20th century. This paper describes how the assetization of mineral matter oscillated between privileging state ownership or foreign direct investment.

Paper long abstract:

Known as a “mining country” in commodity markets, Peru has gone through different legal frameworks of mineral extraction since the mid-20th century. The dictatorship of Manuel Odría created favorable conditions for foreign corporations through the Mining Code of 1950. After some mild reformism, a left-wing dictatorship came to power in 1968 and changed the mining framework to favor sovereign interests. This orientation of state-led development was later reflected in the Constitution of 1979 which established that the state should stimulate mining activity. This changed once again during the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori in the nineties. The Constitution of 1993 erased any special treatment to mining activity at a constitutional level and determined that the state should follow a principle of subsidiarity, becoming involved in business activities only exceptionally.

In this paper, I take this sequence of historical episodes as an example of the ways in which the “operations of the law” contribute to the transformation of mineral matter into resources and assets. The continuous changes in this case illustrate how legal frameworks enable the transition of matter between imperium and dominium – the realms of sovereignty and property, respectively. In this sense, I understand the construction of scenarios for the creation of sources of future streams of revenue as a process of institutional design that necessarily requires state action. I pay attention to the reasoning of the political actors behind each of these regimes of assetization of mineral matter, and how they attempted to safeguard what they designed.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

Efforts to relocalize the production of malting barley reflect a shift toward regenerative agricultural practices. The separation of seeds and roots, which remain in the soil, responds to a new logic of ‘assetization with care’ where the sale of agricultural products intertwines with carbon markets.

Paper long abstract:

Facing climate change and attempts at ecological transition, new ways of accounting for nature in economic practices are emerging, such as natural capital accounting as a corporate strategy for rent-seeking (Levidow, 2020), advancing the idea that contemporary capitalism is experiencing a shift toward processes of assetization (Birch and Muniesa, 2020). However, a growing body of literature (Braun et al. 2021,2023; Delvenne et al. 2023) in STS has shown that when we view economic processes solely from the perspective of the economic logic that seems to prevail, we miss the more discrete changes that are evident when we observe the actual valuation practices of living things. The risk is to develop a research agenda that lacks some of the nuances needed to respond to techno-economic lock-in. Here, we focus on a project that aims to bring together Belgian farmers, agronomists, storers, and maltsters to relocalize the production of malting barley while striving for sustainability throughout the value chain. Cultivated barley quickly becomes entangled in a series of ‘regenerative’ agricultural practices and knowledge aimed at increasing soil fertility. The mature seed destined for malting is separated from the plant and turned into a commodity, while its roots are left in the ground to promote vegetation cover and become a ‘carbon store’. This carbon insetting scheme superimposes a logic of assetization in which land both enables commercial exchanges and generates income for farmers proportional to their efforts to transform their agricultural practices, while creating rents for companies active on carbon markets.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

I analyse how artefacts are designed to embed particular political economies, or to be compatible with particular political economies. I use this analysis to call for a specifically constructivist political economy to address the vagaries of contemporary technoscientific capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Harking back to Langdon Winner’s now classic article, ‘Do artifacts have politics?’, my aim in this paper is to ask a very similar question – namely, do artefacts have political economy? Winner’s original contention was to examine the politics inherent within technologies, without resorting to simplistic technological determinism. Following Winner, I analyse several examples of where artefacts: (1) have been designed in ways that embed and lock us into particular political economies; or (2) are compatible with particular political economies. I illustrate the former using Winner’s own example; that is, Robert Moses design of bridges in New York City in the early 20th century. In turning to the latter, I illustrate, like Winner, a strong and weak version of the compatibility claim by outlining artefacts that have an inherent political economy (strong version) and artefacts that are compatible with a particular political economy (weak version). I use the example of advertising technology (‘adtech’) and artificial intelligence respectively to illustrate these two versions. Finally, I conclude this paper with a call for a specifically constructivist political economy sitting at the interface between science and technology studies (STS) and critical political economy in order to analyse and address the vagaries of contemporary technoscientific capitalism, especially the tendency towards techno-economic lock-in.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper reconstructs a pedagogical imaginary of assetization in the teaching of Georges F. Doriot, a pioneering U.S. venture capitalist, at Harvard Business School, emphasizing its focus on training students to imagine and manage themselves as capitalist enterprises.

Paper long abstract:

Building on the recent literature at the intersection of STS and the history of American capitalism that has emphasized the role of the Pragmatist movement in shaping the business pedagogy in the U.S. and elsewhere (Giraudeau 2018; Muniesa 2017; Muniesa 2016), this paper focuses on the teaching career of Georges F. Doriot, the co-founder of American Research & Development Corporation, one of the first venture capital organizations in the U.S. Doriot taught at Harvard Business School for 40 years (1926 to 1966) and impacted several generations of business leaders, including many pioneering venture capitalists. Using an extensive collection of archival materials and oral histories, most importantly Doriot's teaching notes, this paper reconstructs his pedagogical philosophy. Specifically, it focuses on a set of "techniques of the self" proposed by Doriot that were meant to teach prospective business leaders to imagine themselves as bundles of assets and liabilities, continuous with going business concerns, and manage their personal lives accordingly. In so far as assetization involves a form of imagination -- of imagining things as assets (Muniesa et al. 2017; Birch and Muniesa 2020) – Doriot’s teaching of imagining selves as assets merits attention, while his pedagogical career can be seen as an articulation of an imaginary or a "spirit" of venture capitalism avant la lettre, and an important early precursor of the current "investmentality" (Cook 2017).

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

We examine how subscriptions turn cars into rent-generating technological assets. We study the sociotechnical conditions enabling this shift and trace its impacts on the automotive industry, entrenching powerful interests and eroding the public good.

Paper long abstract:

In July 2022, BMW announced subscriptions for their heated car seats, causing an uproar among car enthusiasts. The idea that individuals would have to subscribe to features installed on vehicles they already own or have been making payments on seemed to undermine the freedom and autonomy classically associated with automobility (Miller 2001; Seiler 2008). On the other hand, industry analysts had long anticipated the integration of subscription payments in light-duty consumer vehicles (Berk 2021). In fact, nearly every automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is gearing up for, or already implementing, subscriptions for built-in functionalities.

The monetization of onboard vehicle features follows a pattern of technological enclosure and “assetization” observed across sectors (Bernevega and Gekker 2021; Birch and Muniesa 2020; Langley 2020). This paper, currently in revision at Engaging Science, Technology and Society, examines subscriptions as a mechanism for transforming consumer-owned vehicles into technological assets that generate rents for automakers. Our concern is the contingencies of how and under what circumstances this assetization is unfolding. First, we analyze the sociotechnical and political-economic conditions that automakers are exploiting to transform consumer vehicles into rent-generating assets. These include governmental mandates for electric vehicles (EVs) and efforts to capitalize on advances in autonomous vehicle (AV) technology. Second, we argue that while the automotive industry has explored assetization in the past, the paywalling of pre-installed functionalities is a distinct phenomenon likely to affect the wider ecology of automobility in ways that further entrench powerful and moneyed interests while undermining consumer welfare and the public good.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

Playlist has become one of the most important ways listening and music taste is being shaped, through which the majority of music listeners consume and discover their music. In this article, we explore how value is allocated algorithmically in the streaming music economy.

Paper long abstract:

We have always listened to music curated by DJs, pop-chart compilers, producers, and friends. However today the computer generated Playlist has become one of the most important ways listening and music taste is being shaped. There is a wealth of literature on the recommender systems in general, and playlist algorithms in particular, exploring the mechanisms of algorithms (Garcia-Gathright et al., 2018) platforms’ ‘curatorial power’ (Eriksson, 2020; Morris, 2015; Prey, 2020), the impact on values and culture (Hodgson, 2021; Seaver, 2022), and the impact on consumers and production (Hesmondhalgh et al., 2023). However there is a dearth of research on how these algorithms are shaped by the financial goals of the recorded music business, and in turn shape the business.

In this article, we aim to fill this gap by exploring how value is allocated algorithmically in the streaming music economy. Understanding this is particularly important, due to the changing dynamics in which music streaming is increasingly understood as an asset rather than a commodity (Sun and Stewart, forthcoming). We draw on concepts such as assetisation (Birch and Muniesa, 2020), rentiership (Birch, 2020; Christophers, 2020) as well as algorithmic rents (O’Reilly et al., 2023) and demonstrate how the playlist becomes a way of extracting value from back-catalogue assets, rather than exploiting the commodity value of individual songs and current artists. From this, we explore how the dominance of music playlist gets in the way of other potential forms of innovation, leading to a lock-in.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores royalty bonds, a growing trend in the assetization of recorded music through a qualitative case study of two firms, the Hipgnosis Song Trust and JKBX, to help understand the techno-economic lock-in of cultural commodities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores music royalty bonds, a growing trend in the assetization of recorded music. Royalty bonds are an investment asset that allow investment firms and investors to buy stock in the rights to music catalogues from record labels and publishers. These bonds are not a new phenomenon, but they have become more viable as an investment asset over the past decade as music streaming platforms have steadily inflated and stabilized the value of recorded music royalties. Throughout In the early 2020s, royalty bonds have surged in popularity, representing a new development in the aggressive financialization of music as a commodity that has been taking place since the late 1990s. This paper considers two cases of music assetization. The Hipgnosis Song Fund (est. 2018) is an investment firm that has acquired the rights to full catalogues of superstars such as Leonard Cohen and Justin Timberlake and rights to individual chart-topping songs from artists such as Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber. JKBX (est. 2022) is a public trading platform that enables individuals to invest in royalty bonds for hits by artists such as Beyoncé and Adele. Drawing on industry trade press, interviews with representatives, and field ethnography at multiple large international music trade events, this paper examines the discourse and disquiet surrounding this trend of music assetization, the policy questions involved in securitizing music for public and private investment, and the ways in which royalty bonds illuminate the techno-economic lock-in of cultural commodities.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The music industry is on the cusp of the wide scale emergence of music as an asset class as a node on the larger move towards its wide scale financialization. This paper argues that this development risks the hybridization of existing modes of extraction under the guise of democratic enterprising.

Paper long abstract:

The music industry is on the cusp of the wide scale emergence of music as an asset class. This move is significant because this type of investment was once only accessible to a privileged closed group within the music industry’s upper echelons. With this development, platforms like JKBX (pronounced jukebox) are emerging with promises of democratising access to music as an asset class whereby music fans will be able to own parts of their favourite recordings. JKBX is not alone in this lane as platforms like AcreTrader, Masterworks, Labelcoin and SongVest have been offering what is touted as “fractional” song trading since 2021 (Hochberg). JKBX has been positioned as a game-changing platform amongst music industry insiders and artists because of the backers, song catalogue and validation from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) give it a significant starting advantage (Marshall). This paper argues that the wide scale emergence of music as an asset class, that supposedly ushers in a golden financialized age for the music industry, in which the music industry’s financialization risks the reproduction of hybridised forms of existing modes of extraction guised as democratic enterprising. JKBX will provide the case throughout this examination. This paper hopes to contribute to ongoing discourse on the contemporary practices that the drive the business of music by unpacking how these contemporary datafication efforts and their resulting systems coat “deeper, uneven and shifting layers of histories” of music industry “development and change” (Reilly and Flores 2).

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper analysis the making of science cooperatives in the field of biotechnology through the concept of asset. It contributes to the understanding of the engineering of social-economic epistemologies and ontologies through digital technology and suggests a critical turn in market design.

Paper long abstract:

The global science organization is undergoing major shifts. The emerging regime is characterized by the political epistemology of neoliberalism, the cross-institutional arrangements of technoscientific capitalism, and a heightened reliance on advanced digital technology. This paper explores the making of digital science cooperatives in the field of biotechnology through the concept of asset. Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study, I examine how the DIY and hacker inspired science reform movement Decentralized Science envisions to reengineer the coproduction of technoscientific knowledge and value. To showcase how designing technology for organizing science entails the continuous planning of systems that couple knowledge and value management and production, I will focus on these cooperatives as instruments that allow to govern heterogeneous actors and distributed resources. By analyzing the making of such digital-native entities, I show how expertise, labor, and research results are purposefully forged into interdependencies by turning them into actionable assets. I identify two salient design elements of science cooperatives: collective intelligence characterized by transepistemic forms of valuation and common ownership enabled by systematic incentivization. Concluding from the case, I argue that the concept of asset is essential for understanding the engineering of expansive and extractive social-economic networks like science cooperatives. Furthermore, I argue that the concept of asset is a key building block for critical market design suggesting a turn from market fundamentalism to market instrumentalism and the need to actively empower and involve individuals and collectives for making and maintaining the calculative environments that shape their thoughts and actions.