As digital technology became integral to the capitalist market dystopia of the first decades of the 21st century, it not only refashioned our ways of communicating but of working and consuming, indeed ways of living. Even as the COVID-19 pandemic revealed not only the lack of investment, planning and preparation that underlay the scandalous slowness of the responses by states around the world, but also grotesque class and racial inequalities as it coursed its way through the population, the owners of high-tech corporations were enriched by tens of billions of dollars. Rejecting both technological determinism and facile ‘cyber-utopian’ thinking, the 57th annual volume of the Socialist Register addresses how to imagine, struggle for, and plan for, new democratic socialist ways of living after the pandemic.

Panelists:

• Introductions: Hilary Wainwright (@hilarypepper) and Leo Panitch

UK essay contributors:

• Grace Blakeley (@graceblakeley) ‘The big tech monopolies and the state’
• Ursula Huws (@Ursulahuws) ‘Reaping the whirlwind: Digitalization, restructuring & mobilization in the Covid crisis’
• Matthew Cole (@matthewacole) & Charles Umney (@CharlesUmney) ‘The political economy of datafication and work’
• Benjamin Selwyn ‘Community restaurants: Decommodifying food as socialist strategy’
• Massimiliano Mollona ‘Working class cinema in the age of digital capitalism’

Discussants:

• Marzena Zukowska (@MarzenaZukowska), Red Pepper and Radical Communicators Network
• John McDonnell (@johnmcdonnellMP), Labour MP, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer 2015-2020