Kean Birch Boeken

The book delves into the growing reliance on Big Tech and the implications of exchanging personal data for access to digital services. It highlights how personal data has become a crucial resource in the digital economy, largely concentrated within a few powerful firms. The author argues that this concentration fosters a parasitic relationship with technoscientific innovation, as Big Tech dictates service terms and shapes technological advancements like AI. A call for reevaluation of data governance and understanding the transformation of personal data into valuable assets is central to the discussion.

Focusing on the life sciences sector, the book explores its potential to drive regional economic renewal through the development of biological products and processes. It highlights how leveraging these advancements can lead to significant social and economic benefits, offering insights for policymakers on harnessing this industrial field to foster sustainable growth and innovation in local economies.

How to understand the crisis and stop the top 1% all at the same time.

In this book, Kean Birch analyses the co-construction of markets and natures in the emerging bio-economy as a policy response to global environmental change. The bio-economy is an economic system characterized by the use of plants and other biological materials rather than fossil fuels to produce energy, chemicals, and societal goods. Over the last decade or so, numerous countries around the world have developed bio-economy strategies as a potential transition pathway to a low-carbon future. Whether this is achievable or not remains an open question, one which this book seeks to answer. In addressing this question, Kean Birch draws on over ten years of research on the bio-economy around the world, but especially in North America. He examines what kinds of markets and natures are being imagined and constructed in the pursuit of the bio-economy, and problematizes the idea that this is being driven by neoliberalism and the neoliberalization of nature(s).

Corporations dominate our worlds. They employ us, sell to us and influence how we think and who we vote for. All aspects of this relationship are explored, from an historical analysis of the spread of capitalism to the regulation, ethics and exclusionary implications of business in contemporary society. The book also examines how corporate power and capitalism might be resisted and outlines a range of alternatives, from the social economy through to new forms of open access or commons ownership. This second edition includes new chapters that explore how global crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate emergency have exposed tensions within and among national business systems. It also addresses the need for new ways of holding business accountable in the era of digital platforms like Facebook, Google and Amazon, which use algorithmic personalization to exert private control over the infrastructure of our societies.

Die kapitalistische Produktionsweise greift auf die ‚Natur’, den ‚Körper’ und das ‚Leben’ historisch in immer neuen Weisen zu und führt zur Entstehung von jeweils besonderen gesellschaftlichen Natur- und Körperverhältnissen. Neueste Entwicklungen umfassen u. a. die reproduktionsmedizinischen Technologien, Produktion und Handel von Eizellen, Spermien, Geweben oder Organen, die Praktiken der ästhetischen Körpergestaltung sowie wiederholte Vorstöße zur Patentierung von Leben. Der menschliche Organismus wird dabei prinzipiell als gestaltbar, transformierbar und züchtbar gedacht. Was ist das spezifisch Kapitalistische daran, kann man von ‚biokapitalistischer’ Vergesellschaftung und entsprechenden Eigentumsverhältnissen (Patente auf Leben) sprechen? Wenn die Inwertsetzung des Lebendigen behauptet wird, stellt sich die Frage, was genau wird in Wert gesetzt? Welche Art von Herrschaft wird dabei ausgeübt? Welche Kämpfe und Auseinandersetzungen werden um das „Leben an sich“ und seine Verwertung geführt?