Abstract
On December 10, 2021, in Edwardsville, Illinois, the Amazon warehouse (“fulfillment center”) received numerous warnings about approaching storms. Amazon told its employees to keep working or be laid off. When the storm tore the roof off, six workers were killed. The state of Illinois wrote the event off as an “accident,” and Amazon was neither censored nor punished.
Thus begins this excellent book on the “enshittification” (Doctorow 2025) caused by digital capitalism. Or in the author Aitor Jiménez’s words, “digital capitalism increases, multiplies, and creates devastating forms of social, economic, political, cultural, and environmental harm under a hype discourse of creativity, innovation, and supposed sustainability” (p. 4). The Crimes of Digital Capitalism: Corporate Crime in an Age of Exploitation examines three conditions that allowed Big Tech to gain unchallenged control over every facet of our daily lives: the massive growth in corporate power neoliberal governments have facilitated; the institutionalization of an “infrastructure of global racial capitalism” (p. 4); and the speedy, overwhelming societal dependence that has resulted. Using a Crimes of the Powerful (Pearce 1976) theoretical lens along with decolonial and green criminologies, this book presents convincing evidence showing “the criminal structure of impunity fostered by digital capitalism along the supply chain” and the “actors, causes and mechanisms” that enable and promote this impunity (p. 26).
Each chapter develops these claims in a different facet of society. First, digitized racial neoliberalism is illustrated by a case study where 20,000 families in the Netherlands were wrongly accused of defrauding the state. Those who were supposed to check the faulty risk-management algorithms believed the computers were more likely to be correct than their clients, who were primarily poor and racialized. Decision-making systems such as this, built by white male tech elites, mirror the classist, often racist assumptions of their creators. Such systems now run everything from wars and finance to policing and welfare.
Chapter Two shows how public education, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, has been offered up to billion-dollar corporations whose goal is not to educate citizens but to deliver profit to shareholders. In many countries Google, Apple, and Facebook hire gig workers, paid by “the piece,” to design curricula, deliver parcels of learning, and evaluate the results. Education becomes a product to be monetized, judged against standards of “efficiency” developed for businesses to maximize profitability. Tech companies have also been given virtually unhindered access to reams of free data and thus virtually unlimited opportunities for surveillance.
Chapter Three shows how warfare has been changed by digital systems that can maximize harm to the enemy at minimal cost to the aggressor. Drones and similar technologies are “designed for extermination, programmed for destruction, and tested on tens of thousands of civilian bodies” (p. 87). Cyberwar technologies represent “a process that reconfigures neoliberal mechanisms to control, punish, and govern the poor” (p. 89) disguised as wars on drugs, terrorism, and illegal immigration. Regulations governing cyberwarfare have no enforcement mechanism, and they reflect the biases of the mostly European nations that have written them. Jiménez makes the ambitious claim that (all?) warfare is a “historical process of dispossession” (p. 96) that can only be fought through collective resistance.
Next, Jiménez looks at the gig economy. While capitalism has always depended on “the exploitation of subaltern subjectivities” (p. 116), algorithmic surveillance allows corporations to oversee and control every moment, every action of the employee, imposing a level of surveillance nineteenth-century capitalists could only dream about. Barred from unionizing 1 and forced to compete against each other, the racialized and poor make up the bulk of those earning the least—Jiménez cites a 2021 study showing that 65 percent of those at the bottom of the pay scale were Black or Latinx (p. 125), and immigrants and the poor are overrepresented in DoorDash, Uber and the like.
The heavy, unsustainable environmental demands of our technologies, and strategies of resistance that have met with at least partial success, are discussed in Chapters Five and Six. Our iPhones and iPads (and their Android counterparts) require minerals that damage those who extract them, the rivers, forests, and the air. Data centers consume vast quantities of electricity. The “religion of infinite growth,” Jiménez shows, is literally killing us. Moreover, he argues, “there is no digital and green recovery without an industrial society organized around fossil fuels” (p. 157). Struggles by indigenous and colonized peoples—Maori in New Zealand and Aymara and Quechua in Latin America—to criminalize environmental offenses and give natural features (such as rivers) political and legal status offer hope, but delivering real change will require a transformational shift in power relations.
Jiménez argues in Chapter Seven that the worldwide dominance of Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta has been achieved through “systematic and deliberate violations of the rules of the game, particularly privacy and competition regulations,” and this has produced “profound and extensive social harms” (p. 189). But billion-dollar fines have proven ineffective, and legislation such as the EU’s Digital Services and Artificial Intelligence Act face enormous barriers. Are these global behemoths ungovernable?
The conclusion addresses this question, arguing that only sustained collective social action can force digital corporations to address the harms they cause. State regulations are ineffective because it is much more profitable to break the law and pay a fine than to remedy the problem. No national or international body has access to the algorithms that drive law-breaking; indeed the “black boxes” are so complicated that even the code writers cannot predict or control all the effects a given program will have. What to do, then? Jiménez confronts the dilemma of all who seek ameliorative social change—the need to rely on nation-states and international institutions to pass and enforce laws restricting capital. He sees law as a battleground on which people must engage despite “the virtual elimination of resistance in the global North” (p. 204). While the ultimate goal is the democratization of the digital means of production, a proximate goal might be ending limited liability for corporations, thereby forcing shareholders and owners to bear the costs of corporate harm. Another idea is an “equity fine,” obliging shareholders who benefited from the corporation’s harmful acts to resocialize some or all of their shares. The book ends with 13 ideas/propositions/alternatives to the dismal reality of today’s digital capitalism, starting with a public agency for digital transition and ending with the creation of an international order based on digital internationalism (p. 206).
This is a very valuable book. It should be read, absorbed, and inhaled by everyone who cares about the ways digitalization has transformed our worlds and wants to do something about it.