IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 81

Smear and
Fear by
Numbers
George Mickhail

T

he new capitalism may be described
in terms of the innovation that enabled corporations to transform their
demand and supply trade exchanges
with their customers and suppliers
through the Internet. This enabled
(and better controlled) corporation's
outsourcing of non-core and core activities, which naturally eliminated the need for capital resources. Furthermore,
this permitted corporations to decapitalize and reduce
considerably their "plant, property, and equipment" with
all the associated long-term financing liabilities (long-term
debt) and associated running and maintenance expenses.
Innovation, outsourcing, and decapitalization represent
the fundamental tenets of the new capitalism.
Institutions in the new capitalism are driven by an
economic ideal of optimal resource allocation through
the use of information technology, leading to maximized utility, or in short: efficiency. The quest for efficiency is a reality involving both private and public
corporations; where an emphasis on control over re source utilization is achieved through methods of
"bureaucratic accounting technology, which can be
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2728732
Date of publication: 7 September 2017

SEPTEMBER 2017

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ISTOCK/SOLSTOCK

Accounting, Information
Technology, and
Economic Control for
the New Capitalism

coupled to totalitarian and democratic political regimes
alike" [1, p. 293]. The problem is that accounting wields
influence over any aspect of society that is subject to
economic calculation, propounding a complex moral
technology that expresses and endorses specific models of social and economic relations.
The language of asset, cost, expense, liability, and
profit that informs accounting is often less precise; its
objective measurement of what an asset or an expense
is, for example, is often highly debatable. Dubious profit
(or loss) measurements have real consequences that
affect our professional and personal lives.
Information technology, like accounting, is chiefly used
for its perceived economic efficiency, and while driven by
ideals of procedural fairness and impartiality, both are
dubious in terms of their accuracy and precision. These
technically ambiguous and not so readily transparent practices, with their abstraction from operational detail, leave
room for misinformation and misinterpretation, which can
lead to tangible freedoms, or a lack thereof. No doubt, new
technological developments, such as the Internet of
Things (IoT) will impact our private and professional lives
alike. The social implications of such a reality have been
widely discussed, with a bleak warning about the erosion
of privacy in the "transparent society" due to the technological efficiency of low-cost surveillance.

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