2025/06/19 by Petter Törnberg · 1 voice · 4 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Capitalism #Economic rent #Economics #FinTech, Crowdfunding, Digital Finance #Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism #Law #Leverage (statistics) #Market economy #Monopoly #Narrative #Neoclassical economics #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Sociology
paper · doi:10.1177/01634437251346684
published in Media Culture & Society 47(8), 1543-1558 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2025/06/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The rise of platforms has transformed our understanding of contemporary capitalism, with the critical literature describing how these firms leverage unprecedented digital powers to extract monopoly rents – perhaps even heralding a new form of Feudalism. This paper draws on the literature on financial narratives to examine the role that such stories play within the form of capitalism that they describe, and what this suggests for the role of “hype” in contemporary capitalism. The same stories that for critical scholars appear as menacing threats of “technofeudalism” or “surveillance capitalism” for investors appear as optimistic stories of promising future returns. By driving financial investments, narratives afford platforms very real social and political powers, enabling them to function as a form of self-fulfilling prophecies. The paper argues for a cultural inflection to the political economy of Big Tech – viewing capitalism as neither mechanistic nor rational, but as an expression of a complex interplay between narrative, technology, and economic power. This suggests the need for a critical hype studies , geared at deconstructing the narratives undergirding the technological waves of capitalist pursuits, and examining the broader role of hype in coordinating and directing flows of capital within contemporary financialized capitalism.