Hao Zhichang: The Issue of Ownership in the Digital Age: From Digital Capitalism to Digital Socialism
Ownership theory is the most clearly identifiable foundational conduit to the analytical paradigm of historical materialism; at the root level, it determines the nature of human society and the prospects of human civilization. If one is to avoid the consequential inversion of cause and effect in the analysis of social reality, one must inevitably remain within the problem-space of ownership and its peripheral concepts. To profoundly grasp the specific social forms and concrete economic structures of any given era, as well as the various relations constructed by historical individuals in real life, ownership remains the primary theoretical and practical issue. In particular, how to interpret the forms of ownership embedded within the new digital civilization is not only a return to a classic problem but an urgent new and genuine problem that demands exploration. However, while the academic community is in the midst of a heated discussion regarding the epochal changes brought about by the digital revolution, the anchoring of the theoretical connotation of ownership in the digital era and its historical evolution toward a "glimpse of the future" [1] have yet to receive a systematic, timely, and progressive interrogation. How should the contemporary form of ownership be identified? Is it moving toward digital capitalism or digital socialism? How, exactly, should the vision for a new digital civilization be planned? In this sense, the prerequisite for understanding digital civilization is a detailed consideration of the constituent elements and operating mechanisms of the concept of ownership, and the digital evolution of different civilizational trajectories based upon them. In a certain sense, this will determine the world of tomorrow.
I. The Connotation of Ownership Theory and Digital Trends
In the Chinese expression, "ownership" (suoyouzhi) refers to a system in the overall process of social production where certain means of production belong to a particular individual or group, thereby allowing the latter to exercise self-determined control, use, distribution, and exchange over them. It determines the basic economic system, economic relations, and the social nature of the production process. As a native term in Chinese, "all-possessing" (suoyou) is not equivalent to the universal quantifier meaning "everything" or "all" [2]; rather, it carries the verbal attribute of "being" or "belonging to" a certain subject for the purpose of "occupying" or "possessing." The phrase "exchanging what one has for what one lacks" (yi qi suoyou, yi qi suowu) in the Mencius [3] is the native Chinese source of this modern term. Regarding terminological equivalence, its German root is Eigentum, composed of the root Eigen (one's own) and the noun suffix -tum. The concept of ownership points toward the "economic system" as a concept of political economy; it represents, in an institutional manner, the social organizational form of the possession and control of the means of production formed between people in the process of social production. In this sense, ownership encompasses a series of dynamic relational categories; it is the fundamental architecture of the relations of production, rather than merely a static entity-category of property or a narrow manifestation of legal rights (property rights or ownership rights). Ownership and property in their entity state can be derivative manifestations of a system of ownership, but ownership as a prerequisite cannot be a derivative of ownership rights or property. Because ownership is the prerequisite and foundation of social production rather than its result, discussing superior social development without it would be an inversion of the fundamental and the incidental.
Engels once criticized Mühlberger’s articles for "distorting economic relations in the Proudhonist manner by translating them into legal terminology." [4] What Engels here calls legal terminology originates from the conditions of material life. The ultimate reason why the difficult problems of digital ownership, digital privacy rights, and digital bare life [5]—currently being discussed so heatedly in the era of digital civilization—cannot be thoroughly resolved lies in the forgetting of this "correct understanding" of digital ownership. For instance, no matter how much legislation is enacted regarding digital privacy rights, the platforms and applications of digital capitalism will still infringe upon privacy in various disguises. This is the result of failing to view the problem from the level of digital ownership. Of course, "it is not to say that improving privacy laws is not a good thing, but rather that it is insufficient to stop the new exploitation and alienation brought about by surveillance capitalism in the digital age."
Within the horizon of Marx’s critique of political economy, the constituent elements of the concept of ownership include: the object of labor, the instruments of labor, the laborer, the non-laborer, and the purposeful activity or labor of the human being. Regarding the object of labor, it is something that the laborer does not directly master before productive labor; the laborer must transform and appropriate it through the process of productive labor. First, the objects of labor include "naturally existing objects of labor." Land and nature are the most original and direct manifestations of this, such as felled trees, extracted ores, and refined oil. Second, with the development of production techniques, the objects of labor are no longer limited to the "naturally existing objects" of agricultural civilization but also include secondary industrial "raw materials." "An object of labor that has already been, so to speak, filtered by previous labor, we call raw material. For example, ore already extracted and being washed." Regarding instruments of labor, they are the medium between the laborer and the object of labor, such as machines. Only through this medium can the laborer transmit their purposeful activity to the object of labor. In this sense, the instruments of labor are an extension of the laborer’s natural limbs. The different forms of labor instruments serve as "gauges" and "indicators" for human civilization in terms of productive forces and relations of production. In Capital, Marx contrasted modern mechanical devices with stone tools to illustrate the "skeletal" and "muscular" systems of different civilizational forms. "What distinguishes economic epochs is not what is made, but how, and by what instruments of labor. Instruments of labor are not only gauges of the degree of development reached by human labor power, but also indicators of the social relations under which the labor is carried on. Among instruments of labor, those of a mechanical nature, which, taken as a whole, may be called the skeletal and muscular system of production, offer much more decisive characteristics of a given epoch of social production than those which, like pipes, tubs, baskets, jars, etc., serve only as receptacles for the objects of labor, and which in the aggregate may be termed the vascular system of production."
These two elements (the object of labor and the instrument of labor) together constitute the means of production. The so-called ownership of the means of production essentially encompasses the ownership of both objects and instruments of labor. It should be noted that instruments and objects of labor are two essential elements in the "process of labor," while "means of production" is a consideration made from the perspective of the "result"—that is, the "product of labor"—or the perspective of the "labor process disappearing into the product." "If the whole process is examined from the point of view of its result, from that of the product, then both the instruments of labor and the object of labor appear as means of production, and the labor itself appears as productive labor." In other words, the reason the means of production are means of production, and are the material elements at the core of ownership, is that they can perform the function of production, a function that can only be consistently displayed from the perspective of the "result." Therefore, these two elements must be placed within productive labor to become means of production; that is, they must pass through the purposeful activity of the laborer and ultimately realize that process as the "product" of the result. Otherwise, the two cannot enter the production system and can only be regarded as non-productive, irrelevant elements, thus remaining unanchored by the concept of ownership.
Once objects and instruments of labor are placed within the general system of social production for analysis, it means that the material means of production must be correlated with human elements such as the laborer and the non-laborer. The problem of the attribution and appropriation of the means of production thus arises, thereby determining the attribution and appropriation of the product as the "result." If the means of production belong to the non-laborer and the laborer lacks them, the non-laborer uses this to appropriate the products produced by the combination of the laborer and the means of production in the direct labor process; this is the private ownership of the means of production. Such is ownership in slave, feudal, and capitalist societies. If the individual laborers fully possess the means of production and engage in free associated labor, this is the public form of ownership—namely, what Marx identified as "social ownership" or the "re-establishment of individual property," which matches the concentration of the means of production and the socialization of labor.
However, the crux of the problem lies here: the social forms of private ownership where the means of production belong to non-laborers manifest as slave, feudal, and capitalist societies, but how were these specific social forms identified? That is to say, all three are forms of private ownership, but how are their differing forms of private ownership expressed? Relying solely on the logic of the attribution and appropriation of the means of production cannot penetrate this issue.
Furthermore, we must delve into the specific operating mechanisms of ownership. The operating mechanisms of ownership differ across different civilizational eras; these mechanisms are manifested in the specific way the means of production and the laborer are combined. Different modes of combination constitute different operating mechanisms of ownership and thus represent the basic nature of different societies. "Relation of attribution is merely the prerequisite and condition for the formation of a certain social economic system... the mode of combination between the means of production and the laborer determines the nature of ownership at a deep level." It is precisely in highlighting this dimension of deep connotation that Marx emphasized the importance of the mode of combination: "In order to produce, they must combine. The specific manner and method in which this combination is effected distinguishes the different economic epochs of the structure of society." [6] In essence, the specific operating mechanism of the concept of ownership, or the special mode of combination among various elements, constitutes the ownership structure of different social characters. Therein, "in every form of ownership, the relationship between the direct laborer and the means of production is different." In the ownership system of slave society, the slave as the direct laborer was no different from the means of production, for the slave was merely a "vocal tool" [7]. The combination of the slave—who had completely lost their personhood—with the means of production was a combination of object with object, and the fruits of production were entirely placed under the control of the slave owner. This mode of combination between object and object mainly took the forms of extraction, plunder, grazing, hunting, and farming according to tribal contracts, clan traditions, or the systems of the city-state. In the ownership system of feudal society, the mode of combination between the direct laborer (the tenant farmer) and the means of production was corvée labor (yaoyi). Ownership manifested itself through the operating mechanism of corvée labor; the tenant farmer needed to pay land rent and provide labor services. In the ownership system of capitalist society, the mode of combination between the two is modern wage labor. In analyzing "the function of productive capital," Marx identified that ownership at this stage means "the capitalist can no longer sell the worker as a commodity, because the worker is not the capitalist’s slave, and the capitalist has bought only the use of the worker’s labor-power for a certain period. On the other hand, the capitalist can only use labor-power by using it to make the means of production function as commodity-forming elements." The generalization of the modern wage labor system—or rather, the generalization of capitalist ownership—brings about a fate in which all means of production become commodities. This caused a revolution in the mode of production and, simultaneously, a modern transformation in the mode of exploitation. This is the operating mechanism of modern ownership, which laid the foundational economic structure of the civilizational form of capital.
The dynamic logic of the history of ownership forms is a basic depiction of different economic forms and social characters. In today's digital economy era, the digital form of ownership has become the underlying logic of digital civilization, prescribing its developmental direction and future prospects. Regarding the digital form of ownership, the raw materials of commodities, instruments of production, logistical systems, and monetary systems encompassed by modern ownership, as well as the mode of combination between laborers and the means of production, have undergone qualitative changes in the transition to the new economic form. This is because "in the era of the digital economy, data has already become an indispensable key raw material, algorithms have already become essential tools of the new world, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become the logistical pipeline connecting digital space to physical space, and blockchain will become the financial infrastructure of the new era." This means that the "indicators" and "gauges" of civilizational forms spoken of by Marx need to be re-examined in the sense of ownership.
In the digital age, the objects of labor have, in a certain sense, detached from the characteristics of nature in its "naturally existing state"—the natural commonality of land, rivers, mountains, and oil—and instead increasingly manifest as an artificial commonality of codes, information, values, affects, and leisure, as articulated by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Commonwealth. This artificial commonality is essentially generated by digital coding within the "digital commons." All virtual traces (data) of people on digital platforms become raw materials for digital production; furthermore, through the processing of digital technology, these raw materials can further become commodities containing digital content, thereby generating exchange value. This means that in cyberspace or on digital platforms, the former "naturally existing state" of labor objects has been transformed into virtual cyberspace or the "digital commons," while previously secondary "filtered objects of labor" or "raw materials" have been transformed into virtual data (since data must be generated through user behavior, it is the virtualized form of the "filtered object of labor"). Nick Srnicek points out in Platform Capitalism: "We should treat data as a raw material that must be extracted, and user activities as the natural source of this raw material. Just like oil, data is a substance that is extracted, refined, and used in various ways." It is precisely in this way that user data constitutes the "filtered object of labor." As for the instruments of labor, the digital ecosystem structured by cloud computing, intelligent algorithms, blockchain, 5G communication engineering, and generative AI like ChatGPT has not only extended the "skeleton" and "muscles"—the natural limbs of the laborer—but has also extended the "brain" and "mind"—their intellectual organs. Moreover, compared to tangible machines, they suffer almost zero wear and tear. Consequently, the laborers and non-laborers who constitute the human element of ownership have also transformed from natural human beings into non-natural "quasi-humans." If non-natural "quasi-humans" wish to avoid exclusion and marginalization in the era of digital civilization, their purposeful activities must enter cyberspace to engage in digital production; thus, digital objects of labor and digital instruments of labor necessarily yield digital means of production in the dimension of "results."
Even more importantly, however, the forms of ownership in the digital age will yield more profound significance in terms of their appropriation, use, and internal operational logic: will we move toward a digital capitalist or a digital socialist form of ownership? These will characterize different vistas of digital civilization. Because the so-called digital trend in ownership means that the constituent elements of ownership have undergone a massive shift, the question of their attribution and specific operational mechanisms will ultimately confirm the fundamental nature of ownership itself. There is no doubt that a digital trend has already appeared in ownership; therefore, how to further confront the realistic encounters of digital ownership forms in the present era, and how to anticipate the new civilizational logic of digital ownership forms, has become the crux of the problem to be solved next.
II. Digital Capitalist Ownership, Public Use, and Self-Exploitation
In terms of its objective constituent elements, ownership in the digital age has achieved a new leap in digital form. Digitalized means of production have become the new "skeletal" and "muscular" systems, the new "brain" and "heart" organs of the digital civilizational form; they are its "intelligent measures" and "intelligent indicators." However, the theory of ownership's digital trend is, in its reality—or rather, in the further attribution and specific combination of the means of production—currently at a "crossroads" of digital civilization. Whither digital civilization? Where do its fate and trajectory point? Without a doubt, when it is embedded in the track of digital capitalism, new and more clandestine forms of surplus value production and exploitation are born. "In many cases, we are not dealing with a techno-political system outside of capitalism or its 'aberration,' but rather with a variant of capitalism, only it is now running on some new hardware and software foundations." This is precisely the case for digital capitalist ownership; some things have changed, while others have not truly changed, and this is exactly what Athan Sadowski calls "too smart" capitalism's practical application of ownership in the digital age: when a revamped ownership is guided onto the track of modern high-stage capitalist private ownership, it will continue capital's immutable civilizational pursuit of servitude. Thus, a new kind of pleasure and sorrow will begin to ferment under the domination of digital capitalist ownership. Therefore, when discussing the normative direction digital civilization should take, we must face its realistic encounters head-on to better respond to its future aspirations.
On the whole, the forms of ownership relied upon by digital capitalism have undergone a massive change in the attribution and specific combination of the means of production. It replaces the exclusive use characteristic of traditional private ownership with the beautiful lie of "public use," and replaces the antagonism of exploitation-by-others with the willingness of self-exploitation, thereby continuing to maintain its own stable position. This constitutes the signature move of the digital capitalist operational mechanism.
Digital capitalist ownership is the necessary prerequisite and foundation for digital capitalist production. On the surface, digital capitalism utilizes a series of technologies such as big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence to update social production methods into a digitalized existence, thereby achieving capital's power of command in the new digital realm. As Lan Jiang has stated: "A typical feature of the digital era or digital capitalism is the digitalization of everything, transforming it into data that can enter the cloud computing interface." But moving further, these typical features of digital capitalism are merely appearances or results; their deep-seated prerequisite and foundation is the practical application of digitalized ownership. That is to say, only when the digitalized constituent elements of ownership adopt a capitalist organizational structure in the further attribution and specific combination of the means of production can capitalism successfully perpetuate itself in a new variant—digital capitalism. Therefore, "as long as capitalist society cannot fundamentally solve the problem of unequal ownership, it is impossible to truly escape the fundamental contradictions of capitalism."
As mentioned above, user behavior data and the digital ecosystem structured by cloud computing, intelligent algorithms, blockchain, 5G communication engineering, and generative AI such as ChatGPT constitute, respectively, the "filtered objects of labor" and instruments of labor in the digital age. The ultimate goal of digital labor objects and digital labor instruments is to enter the digitalized production system and transform into digital surplus profit; only in this way can they exist in the form of digital means of production. Furthermore, the raw data of user behavior must be extracted, quantified, analyzed, and mobilized through instruments of labor in the form of technology (such as algorithmic logic), otherwise the raw data remains meaningless. Therefore, the two must be combined in the process of capital production to form a systematized set of digital means of production. However, once the digital means of production take shape, they become the private "constant capital" of the digital platform, belonging to the owners of the digital platform rather than to the public—the users—who participated in the behavior. In other words, it is the shareholders or capitalists of the digital platform, rather than the users, who appropriate the digital means of production and the digital surplus profits they generate. Imagine: when digital giants such as Facebook, Google, or YouTube sell, transfer, or distribute the platform's digital means of production, users are not informed, nor are their opinions or rights considered. This is because users are not owners of the digital means of production; they have no right of appropriation over them. This holds even though platforms like Facebook often cultivate a digital culture suggesting that users are the masters of the platform, that users rather than the platform create content, and that the "Facebook revolution" is a form of democratic communication, and so on. Christian Fuchs points out in Digital Labour and Karl Marx that Facebook's shares and control are entirely in the hands of 12 executives and the board of directors: "Facebook is not owned by the users, but by a set of directors and companies... Facebook's economic poor, they have no control over ownership, but they create the wealth that is controlled and owned by the shareholders." Thus, whether it is the raw material of user behavior data or the production technology of intelligent algorithms, the attribution of ownership points toward the platform capitalist. "This is a one-way mirror asymmetry: on one side is infinite power, and on the other is infinite surrender."
More importantly, regarding the specific combination of digital means of production and users, digital capitalist ownership adopts a more flexible, "non-standard" digital wage-labor system. The so-called standard wage-labor system refers to laborers being purchased by capitalists in the free market in the form of a special commodity, signing long-term employment contracts with capitalists, and obtaining stable wages. According to Marx's analysis, the formation of the standard wage-labor system enables the employed laborer to use the means of production as a constituent element of the commodity. In the capitalist mode of production, as long as production occurs, the two must be combined, and the specific mode of combination constitutes the criterion for distinguishing specific economic periods. This is also the basic function of the wage-labor system within capitalist ownership: "The means of production themselves become the physical form of productive capital, or productive capital, only when labor-power, as the human existence of productive capital, can be merged with the means of production." Therefore, only by clarifying the specific, concrete combination mode of digital capitalist ownership—the "non-standard" digital wage-labor system—can we confirm the digital economic period derived from capitalism. In fact, beginning in the 1970s, along with the flexibilization of production modes, the standard wage-labor system gradually took on a new appearance, especially today. The so-called "non-standard" digital wage-labor system refers to users acting as wage laborers engaged in digital behavior, producing digital surplus value, and obtaining a certain "wage." On the surface, this judgment seems contrary to common sense, because users have never sold themselves in the free market or signed contracts with specific platform capitalists, let alone obtained wages. However, as Ruth Milkman says in her work on work intensification in the age of surveillance capitalism: "Capitalists not paying users for using their services seems analogous to industrial capitalists not paying workers wages. But this does not mean there is no transaction ongoing. Just as a worker cannot get a wage without working, a user cannot access the services and platforms they need without relinquishing significant rights to their data." In the digital age, new work intensification and new exploitation have long forced "wages" to be paid in the form of "free services." Moreover, the consequence of not having "free services" today is much like early workers not having "wages"—one cannot conduct a normal socialized life. "Free services" ultimately act like early "wages," forcing the public to be absorbed as loyal users of the platform; the "labor power" economy of the body is replaced by the "attention" economy of the eye. It can be said that "this is a wage labor of non-traditional wage labor and a wage of non-traditional wages; it is a high-stage form of wage labor and wages, rather than their negation."
The traditional or standard wage-labor system has undergone a major shift in today's digital age: from labor power being purchased in physical markets to attention being "recruited" on virtual platforms; the former receives traditional wages, while the latter receives a new type of service. Only in this sense can we deeply understand why social platforms like Facebook always claim that "it is the users, not us, who are producing digital content." But no matter how it changes, the extraction of surplus value is always in progress.
Within the concept of ownership, the ownership of the means of production and the manner in which they are combined determine the appropriation, use, distribution, and exchange of products. Among these, the link of "use" has become the breakthrough point for the massive transformation of ownership in the digital age. The formation of the wage-labor system in the digital age relies heavily on the "public use" model of digital platforms. "Public use" is a commercial ruse of "free economics"; its original meaning is to "manufacture consent" [12] and obscure the antagonistic mode of exclusive use inherent in traditional ownership. Within the fate of digital capitalism, the "use" model internal to digital forms of ownership has been the first to undergo self-renewal and transformation. In traditional capitalist private ownership, use was merely the "Other-use" by those to whom the means of production belonged, rather than the "self-use" of the wage laborers; it was exclusionary. The relationship between private ownership and privileged use has been closely linked for a long time in human civilization. However, in the digital age, with the further expansion of the socialization of production and digital technologization, the "self-use" of the masses provides precisely a new pathway for the exploitation of surplus value. We see that digital video providers, digital music streaming companies, digital social platforms, digital book subscription service platforms, and digital shopping platforms all reflect the waning or even disappearance of the exclusive use characteristic of digitalized ownership—any user can download and use them online for free. In cyberspace, the possession of things and the privileged use it brings are not as important as before, whereas the mass use of things is different; this mode of use has created the business model of the digital market.
This is the digital innovation of moving from "owning what you buy" to "using what you subscribe to." Kevin Kelly pointed out in his book The Inevitable that new modes of use are opening up new economic fields, because when consumers choose to use a service rather than buy a product, they generate a stronger sense of identity. More importantly, "the use model pulls the user closer to the producer; consumers often take on the role of producer," and "as a new prosumer [13], you are encouraged to find bugs and report them to the company, seek technical help from other consumers in forums, and develop your own extension plug-ins and improvements." According to this explanation, only by clarifying the shift in the digital age where "public use" replaces traditional "privileged use" can one recognize the essence of digital capitalism or platform capitalism: social platforms, short videos, and retail websites by no means function merely for socializing, entertainment, or shopping; they shape digital labor that integrates production and consumption through the method of "public use," thereby essentially still functioning as means of production. Therefore, these platforms are by no means as simple as the public-interest, free means of socializing depicted by platform owners; rather, they are means of production for producing and extracting surplus value in a new cyber-spacetime, which rapidly concentrate digital capital and wealth into the hands of digital platform owners and monopolize the production of general intellect. Facebook, YouTube, and others have never proactively presented digital content; instead, they "recruit" users into it by way of "public use" or "free services." This "recruitment" through "public use" or "free use" is the new wage-labor system of digital capitalist ownership, just as Facebook advertised: "Facebook is free and always will be," "The world will be a better place if you share more," and so on. In reality, however, as voluntary "recruits," users are producing digital surplus value every moment and are ubiquitously exploited by the "public use" model. Because the ultimate beneficiary of "public use" remains the owner of the means of production—namely, the increase in the wealth of platform capitalists—"free economics" does not mean a lack of profit. "The rise of free economics is driven by the technological progress of the digital age. Today, the most interesting businesses are those that use 'free' to make money." Therefore, "public use" is actually a paradigm of production, a profitable paradigm of digital production, rather than a leisure activity of free entertainment.
Furthermore, the profits of "public use" or "free economics" within the orbit of digital capitalist ownership are realized through self-exploitation; it is precisely amidst such "laughter and joy" that users are easily despoiled of everything. The self-exploitation manifested in digital capitalist ownership is an evolution of other-exploitation. What "public use" or "free economics" manufactures is an affirmative culture of "strong identity," which dilutes the antagonistic and negative contradictions between labor and capital in traditional capitalism, while also reflecting the innovation of the desire for capital valorization and the improvement of capital valorization efficiency. "Exploitation no longer takes place through alienation and de-realization, but becomes freedom and self-fulfillment. Here, there is no Other as exploiter, but the self willingly squeezing itself." In digital society, the "freedom and self-fulfillment" imagined by the user is actually "self-exploitation"; the user appears to be unfettered within the publicity of use, as the coercive "you should" characterized by former private ownership gives way to an encouraging "you can." It should be noted that, according to Byung-Chul Han's explanation, the worker is shaped into an "entrepreneur," and "in immaterial production, everyone owns their own means of production." In fact, what Han failed to realize is that digital laborers in digital society do not "own" "their own means of production," but merely "use" "their own means of production"; users are not "entrepreneurs," but "recruited" new-type wage laborers. Only in this sense does "freedom and self-fulfillment" lead to the self-exploitation of surplus value.
But it must be seen that the "freedom and self-fulfillment" signified by "you can" can actually only be a new conquest and a new exploitation: under the conditions of digital capitalist ownership, the behavior of the owner will be internalized as the behavior of the non-owner, and the means of this internalization is self-exploitation. At the same time, external exclusionary violence turns into systemic internal violence from which the user cannot escape; the user's freedom, self-fulfillment, and liberation are out of the question within this illusion. This is by no means the true future of digital civilization; otherwise, digital civilization can only continue to march forward headlong within the fate of capitalism.
III. Digital Socialist Ownership and a New Digital Civilization
For digital civilization, digital capitalist ownership is by no means its final destiny, but merely a trajectory. The trend of ownership change in any era is determined by the level of development of the productive forces. Today, the revolution in productive forces led by digital intelligent technology is highlighting and empowering the high-level evolutionary trend of ownership with unexpected strength. Digital capitalist ownership not only extracts digital surplus value in new ways but also creates the material potential energy or digital singularity to subvert itself, as Slavoj Žižek stated: "The prospect of the Singularity opens up a path beyond capitalism." At the level of social structure, being vigilant against the emergence of digital dictatorship and the Digital Leviathan, moving beyond the path of digital capitalism, and exiting the digital capitalist application of ownership means the exploration and construction of digital socialist ownership, the latter of which provides a substantive and foundational explanation for digital socialism and a new digital civilization.
First, regarding the question of the ownership of digital means of production in the transition toward digital socialist ownership—that is, the ownership of user behavior data (digital objects of labor) and cloud computing, digital platforms, 5G communication engineering, generative AI like ChatGPT, etc. (digital instruments of labor)—these should follow a public or socialized attribution, rather than the exclusionary or privatized attribution found in digital capitalist ownership. Today, digital capitalist ownership has skillfully changed the "use" aspect of ownership theory; it numbs the masses by way of "public use," creating an almost complete illusion of possession and ownership of digital means of production among the public. However, one must realize that when digital super-profits flow only into the hands of digital capitalists at the top of the pyramid, and when the mist of "self-exploitation" is cleared away, the false ownership of digital means of production is pierced. Since the true ownership of the digital means of production is not a matter of appearance but an internal structural issue of ownership, no matter how high the degree of socialization or how obvious the collectivist characteristics the digital means of production display, as long as they are within the structure of digital capitalist ownership, they cannot be equated with digital socialism.
Precisely so, Donatella Della Ratta pointed out in the article "Digital Socialism Beyond Digital Society" that the economics of the "Wikipedia" paradigm and "free access" digital platforms will never automatically lead to digital socialism. On the contrary, they are accelerating the "digital colonization" and "digital primitive accumulation" of capitalism. "Silicon Valley's platform capitalism has not only dramatically changed the overall meaning of the sharing economy—turning what were once happily cooperating peer groups of volunteers into a frustrated army of unpaid or low-paid labor—but now must deal with the unexpected: the catastrophic consequences of the commons being commodified and exploited." This means that digital socialism cannot blindly wait for or pin its hopes on the automatic transformation of digital capitalism, but needs to constantly construct itself within the critique of digital capitalist ownership. In the structural orientation of digital socialist ownership, the aim should be to develop and maintain digital means of production as public utilities and for the public interest, avoiding their extraction and operation as the absolute and sole factors for capital valorization. Replacing the capital model of "digital traffic above all" with the people's possession of digital interests is the prerequisite for the true ownership of digital means of production—the realization of socialized or public attribution of digital means of production. When Marx analyzed the question of the socialist appropriation of the means of production, he pointed out: "The direction of our efforts should be to ensure that no instrument of production ever again becomes private property... All means of production should be socialized, so as to guarantee that everyone has both the right and the possibility to use their own labor power." Digital socialist ownership is the theoretical reflection of this direction; this effort is to ground "public use" upon the "public ownership" or "social ownership" of digital means of production, making true ownership and true use in the digital age possible. Otherwise, "public use" is a new-type scam of the digital civilization era, and digital civilization itself cannot open up a new form of civilization; it remains a form of civilization subordinate to capitalist private ownership—where capital still dominates everything with a new, concealed face. As Tom Slee observed: "The value of TripAdvisor may lie in the content provided by users, but TripAdvisor itself is owned by its shareholders and investors." "TripAdvisor" is not just an individual case; the digital platforms engulfed by digital capitalist ownership all "selflessly" toss out the "use" link in ownership, thereby exchanging it for even more selfish and self-serving exploitative consequences. In the era of digital capitalism, the chain of ownership continues the same logic of capital valorization in a fractured guise. The attitude of digital socialist ownership toward the question of ownership should be clear: users or digital laborers both use and create digital means of production, and they own digital means of production.
Secondly, predicated upon the "public ownership" or "social ownership" of digital productive forces, the trend toward a direct integration of digital means of production and digital laborers—relying on a higher level of digital-intelligent productive forces—should also be a focal point of exploration in the digital era. In Capital, Marx provided the following analysis of the coordinates in the civilizational history of ownership across different societies: "Capitalist private property is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on co-operation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production which are themselves produced by labor." "Private property founded on the labor of the proprietor" exists in a state of low productive forces, where the isolated, individual laborer is simply and directly integrated with the means of production. With the development of productive forces driven by the Industrial Revolution, capitalist private property negated this simple direct integration. Its mode of integration is universalized, socialized wage labor—an indirect mode of integration where the laborer and the means of production are first separated and then combined, which makes the systematic production process of capitalism possible. The "negation of negation" implied by the reconstruction of individual property envisioned by Marx is precisely a direct integration at a higher level of productive forces. "Common possession" or "public ownership" at a higher level of productive forces serves as the foundation for this higher-stage direct integration. The reconstruction of individual property transcends private ownership where labor is subordinated to capital; it is autonomous associated labor implemented on the basis of common possession of the means of production. This so-called autonomous associated labor means that the integration of the laborer and the means of production possesses direct sociality [14]. A high-order mode of direct integration allows laborers to actively participate in every link of social production, distribution, and management, transcending the ills of capitalist society.
Of course, socialist ownership, as a transitional stage between capitalist ownership and the reconstruction of individual property in the stage of the "association of free individuals," must undergo a long-term historical struggle and development to ultimately realize the form of public ownership. Today, digital technology empowers the new development of socialism and human civilization with unprecedented force. Conversely, regarding the indirect mode of integration within digital capitalist ownership—namely, the "non-standardized" new type of wage labor mentioned above, where attention is recruited on virtual platforms in exchange for free services—users suffer from the exclusion and exploitation of digital capitalist private property at every moment, just as they did in the factories of the traditional capitalist era. It is simply that today, invisible electronic confinement cells have replaced the whips and fine-books of the past. For instance, "the rating system is a front that companies use to 'blacklist' users and enforce their own disciplinary codes: Airbnb will kick a host off the platform (as recently happened in Los Angeles) whenever it is politically advantageous to do so, and Uber will arbitrarily fire drivers at the whim of executives." In fact, the most typical characteristics of digital means of production are their openness, shareability, cooperativeness, and democratization; these characteristics are also the basic forms of expression for the entire networked world. It is precisely because of these characteristics that raw data can continuously develop in a spiral toward useful massive data. Digital means of production inherently reject the trend of privatization because a privatized monopoly structure contradicts these characteristics, hindering the release of their potential and the realization of their social benefits. The direct integration of laborers and digital means of production in the digital era is a high-order mode of integration aimed at transcending the exclusionary and monopolistic ills of the indirect integration found in digital capitalist private property.
In the practical logic of digital socialist ownership, the basic economic system of socialism with Chinese characteristics has deepened and advanced the development of digital socialist ownership, while also nurturing new possibilities for the digital form of social ownership or the reconstruction of individual property.
General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized: "We have ushered in a historical period of intersection between the world's new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation and the transformation of China's development mode." We must clearly recognize that "some historical periods of intersection may produce resonance at the same frequency, while others may be missed." The historical period of intersection brought by the digital revolution is also nurturing a new digital civilization distinct from the state of private property. This new digital civilization is essentially a symbiotic and integrated composite new civilization, rather than a solitary, independent type of civilization. It is the presentation of material, political, spiritual, social, and ecological civilizations in a more efficient form achieved on the basis of digital technology; it is the digital representation of the new form of human civilization. At the current stage, the new form of human civilization and its digital representation—the new digital civilization—are grounded in the basic economic system of socialism. The Report to the 20th CPC National Congress, grounded in the New Era, emphasized: we must "build a high-level socialist market economy. We will persist in and improve the basic socialist economic system, unswervingly consolidate and develop the public sector, and unswervingly encourage, support, and guide the development of the non-public sector, giving full play to the decisive role of the market in resource allocation and better playing the role of the government." The 20th National Congress also clearly proposed advancing the construction of "Digital China." "Digital China" is the "Chinese scenario" of the digital era, and even more so, it is the digital civilizational form of the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, rooted in the foundation of the socialist ownership system with Chinese characteristics.
In the digital era, the original exploration of the ownership structure of socialism with Chinese characteristics has provided institutional guarantees for the concentration of digital means of production and the socialization of digital labor. "We must adhere to the people-centered development philosophy, promote 'Internet + education,' 'Internet + medical care,' 'Internet + culture,' etc., so that the masses run fewer errands while data travels more, continuously improving the equalization, universality, and convenience of public services." The focus of the new digital civilization is a socialist civilization that benefits the people, rather than a capitalist civilization that chases traffic and profit. The digital socialist ownership represented by "Digital China" upholds the position of public ownership as the mainstay. In the primary stage of socialism, digitized economies where mixed ownership and private enterprises hold controlling stakes still exist and play an important role; however, they are influenced by public ownership, which holds the dominant position. Their developmental course and civilizational attributes will also unfold within this influence. For mixed-ownership and privately-controlled digital economies, if the mixed ownership involves a state-owned enterprise holding a controlling stake, the relationship of direct integration between laborers and means of production will more prominently reflect the requirements of the public-owned character. For cases controlled by private enterprises, although the enterprise may lean toward the operating mechanisms and integration modes of private property, it will certainly be regulated by the economic structure of socialist public ownership. In this way, the new digital civilization contained within "Digital China" has pivoted away from and transcended the trajectory of digital capitalist civilization, endowed human civilization with a new narrative logic, and provided a Chinese paradigm for digital socialism. In short, the new chapter of digital civilization not only displays Chinese characteristics but also highlights global significance.