Technopolitics

This text argues that the erosion of privacy is not a by-product of information and communication technologies, but a systemic property of informational capitalism. The foundational myths of the information society motivate and legitimise the building of control systems applying probabilistic techniques to control future risks. At the root of this configuration are antagonistic labour relationships which have determined the path of technological development since the Industrial Revolution. Those tendencies have reached a culmination in the recent neo-liberal crisis. The digital commons offers itself as an incomplete and tentative remedy.

A book by the leading English-language regulationist, Bob Jessp, with co-author Ngai-Ling Sum, focusing on the characterization of Fordism, its breakdown and ways to characterize the period "after Fordism" in its qualitative differences, particularly due to the fully global and therefore, multicivilizational dimensions of the new regime of accumulation.

New comment: As I have noted somewhere in these discussions, I propose that as a a starting point economic 'cycles' should have a strong role in periodisation, because without those, we are moving outside the Kondratieff framework. Periods would then be simply named after perceived leading technologies, they would represent 'paradigms' but what drives the transition from one to the other would be difficult to argue.

This text by Brian Ashton, which appeared on OpenMute http://www.metamute.org/en/Logistics-Factory-Without-Walls, and was forwarded to me by a friend of mine, covers some interesting issues on logistics and Just-In-Time production.

This table is taken from p. 19 of The Economics of Industrial Innovation
by Christopher Freeman and Luc Soete (1997 edition).